Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/196

 II. THE PEKCEPTION OF SPACE. (II.) 1 By Professor WILLIAM JAMES. 3. The Synthesis of the original sensible Bignesses. IN previous sections I sought to show that the primitive experience, which lies at the bottom of our knowledge of space, is the quality of bigness or extensiveness which all of our sensations possess. 2 I showed, moreover, that if an original sensation of extent were subdivided into parts by discriminative attention, these parts must come to be per- ceived, through processes of association, in definite relations of mutual position and order. I said nothing, however, of the combination of one sensible space-total with another, the inquiry to which we must now turn. It breaks into two subordinate problems : (1) How is the subdivision and measurement of the several sensorial spaces com- pletely effected! and (2) How do their mutual addition and fusion and reduction to the same scale, in a word, how does their synthesis, occur? I think that, as in the investigation just finished, we found ourselves able to get along without in- voking any data but those that pure sensibility on the one hand, and the ordinary intellectual powers of discrimination and recollection on the other, were able to yield; so here we shall emerge from our more complicated quest with the conviction that all the facts can be accounted for on the supposition that no other mental forces have been at work save those we find everywhere else in psychology ; sensibility, namely, for the data, and discrimination, asso- ciation, memory and choice, for the rearrangements and combinations they undergo. 1 Continued from MIND No. 45. 2 Consensus is such a precious thing in the present state of psychology, that I cannot refrain from reminding the reader that in this, the funda- mental and indispensable, part of my thesis, I have an ally in Mr. James Ward, whose article " Psychology " in the edition still publishing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, seems to me, on the whole, the deepest and subtlest collective view of the subject which has appeared in any language. Extensity is Mr. Ward's name (see pp. 46, 53, of the article) for this primi- tive quality of sensation, out of which our several perceptions of extension grow.