Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/205

 192 w. JAMES : the moon ? answers which vary from a cartwheel to a wafer illustrate this most strikingly. The hardest part of the training of a young draughtsman is his learning to feel directly the relative angular or retinal magnitudes which different parts of the field of view subtend. To do this he must recover what Buskin calls the " innocence of the eye" that is, a sort of childish perception of flat stains of colour merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify. With the rest of us this innocence is lost. Out of all the visual magnitudes of each known object we have selected one as the real one to think of, and degraded all the others to serve as its signs. This ' real ' magnitude is determined by aesthetic and practical interests. It is that which we get when the object is at the distance most propitious for exact visual discrimination of its details. This is the distance at which we hold anything we are examining. Farther than this we see it too small, nearer too large. And the larger and the smaller feeling vanish in the act of suggesting this one, their more important meaning. As I look along the dining-table I overlook the fact that the farther plates and glasses feel so much smaller than my own, for I know that they are all equal in size, and the feeling, which is a present sensation, is eclipsed in the glare of the knowledge, which is a merely imagined one. If the inconsistencies of sight-spaces inter se can thus be reduced, of course there can be no difficulty in equating sight- spaces with spaces given to touch. In this equation, it is the touch-feeling which prevails as real and the sight which serves as sign a relation made necessary not only by the far greater constancy of felt over seen magnitudes, but by the greater practical interest which the sense of touch pos- sesses for our lives. As a rule, things only benefit or harm us by coming into direct contact with our skin : sight is, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, only a sort of anticipatory touch, the latter is the " mother-tongue of thought," and the hand- maid's idiom must be translated into the language of the mistress before it can speak to the mind. Later on we shall see that the feelings excited in the joints when a limb moves, are used as signs of the path traversed by the extremity. We seem to have in these joint-feelings instances of space-feelings, small in se, but geometrically similar to larger ones, preserving their form but suggesting the magnified scale of other sensations with which they are identified. But of this more anon. As for the equating of sound-, smell- and taste-volumes with those yielded by the more discriminative senses, they are too vague to need any