Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/19

 6. PKOF. W. JAMES I object like a large book, noiselessly to his face, he will im- mediately become aware of the object '-s presence and position likewise of its departure. A friend of the writer, making the experiment for the first time, discriminated unhesitat- ingly between the three degrees of solidity of a board, a lattice-frame and ,a~ sieve, held close to his ear. Now as this sensation is never used by ordinary persons as a means of perceptioja, we may fairly assume that its felt quality, in those whose attention is called to it ,for the first time, belongs to it qud sensation, and owes nothing to educational suggestions. But this felt quality is most distinctly and unmistakably one of vague spatial vastness in three dimen- sions quite. as much so as is the felt quality of the retinal sensation, when we lie on our back and fill the entire field of vision with the empty blue sky. When an object is brought near the ear we immediately feel shut in, contracted ; when the object is removed, we suddenly feel as if a transparency, clearness, openness, had. been made outside of us. And the feeling will, -by anyone who will take the, pains to observe it, be acknowledged to involve the third dimension in a vague, unmeasured state. 1 The reader will have noticed, in this enumeration of facts, that the voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the organ that yields it. The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet give us feelings of great volume. The same lack of exact proportion between size of feeling and size of organ affected obtains within the limits of particular sensory organs. An object appears smaller on the lateral portions of the retina than it does on the fovea, as may be easily verified by holding the two forefingers parallel and a couple of inches apart, and transferring the gaze of one eye from one to the other. Then the finger not directly looked at will appear to shrink, and this whatever be the direction of the fingers. On the tongue a crumb, or the calibre of a small tube, appears larger than between the fingers. If two points kept equi- distant (blunted compass- or scissors-points, for example) be drawn across the skin so as really to describe a pair of parallel lines, the lines, will appear farther apart in some spots than in others. If, for .example, we draw them hori- zontally across the face, so that the mouth falls between 1 That the sensation in question is one of tactile rather than of acoustic sensibility would seem proved by the fact that a medical friend of the writer, both of whose mevibrance tympani are quite normal, but one of whose ears is almost totally deaf, feels the presence and withdrawal of objects as well at one ear as "at the other.