Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/15

 & PEOF. W. JAMES : when we contract our thigh muscles than when we twitch an eyelid or some small muscle in the face. It seems more- over as if this difference were not wholly explained by trac- tion on different amounts of skin and joint. In the sensations of smell and taste this element of varying vastness seems less prominent but not altogether absent. Some tastes and smells appear less extensive than complex flavours, like that of roast meat or plum pudding on the one hand, or heavy odours like musk or tuberose on the other. The epithet sharp given to the acid class would seem to show that to the popular mind there is something narrow and, as it were, streaky, in the impression they make, other flavours and odours being bigger and rounder. The sensations derived from the inward organs are also distinctly more or less voluminous. Repletion and empti- ness, suffocation, palpitation, headache, are examples of this, and certainly not less spatial is the consciousness we have of our general bodily condition in nausea, fever, heavy drowsi- ness and fatigue. Our entire cubic content seems then sensibly manifest to us as such, and feels much larger than any local pulsation, pressure or discomfort. Skin and retina are, however, the organs in which the space-element plays the most active part. Not only does the maximal vastness yielded by the retina surpass that yielded by any other organ, but the intricacy with which our attention can subdivide this vastness and perceive it to be composed of lesser portions simultaneously coexisting alongside of each other, is without a parallel elsewhere. The ear gives a greater vastness than the skin, but is considerably less able to subdivide it. Now my first thesis is, that this element, discernible in each and every sensation, though more developed in some than in others, is the original sensation of space, out of which all the exact knowledge about space that we afterwards come to have is woven by processes of discrimination, association and selection. Extensiveness, on this view, becomes an element in each sensation just as intensity is. The latter everyone will admit to be a distinguishable though not separable ingredient of the sensible quality. In like manner extensiveness, being an entirely peculiar kind of feeling in- describable except in terms of itself, and inseparable in actual experience from some sensational quality which it must accompany, can itself receive no other name than that of -sensational element, It must now be noted that the vastness hitherto spoken of is as great in one direction as in another. Its dimensions are so vague that in it there is no question as yet of surface