Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/23

 10 PEOF. W. JAMES : So far, all we have established or sought to establish is the existence of the vague form or quale of spatiality as an inseparable element bound up with the other qualitative peculiarities of each and every one of our sensations. The numerous examples we have adduced of the variations of this extensive element have only been meant to make clear its strictly sensational character. In very few of them will the reader have been able to explain the variation by an added intellectual element, such as the suggestion of a. recollected experience. In almost all it seemed the im- mediate psychic effect of a peculiar character of nerve-process excited ; and all the nerve-processes in question agree in yielding what space they do yield to the mind in the shape of a simple total vastness, in which, primitively at least, no order of parts or subdivisions reigns. Let no one be surprised at this notion of a space without C 6rder. There maybe a space without order just as there may be an order without space. 1 And the primitive percep- tions of space are certainly of an unordered kind. The order which the spaces first perceived potentially include 'must, before being realised by the mind, be woven into those spaces by a rather complicated set of intellectual acts first the whole, then the parts. The primordial sensations .'of largeness which the spaces yield must be measured and -subdivided by consciousness, and the various original totals "of extension added together, so as to form by their synthesis what we know as the real Space of the objective world. In ithese operations, imagination, association, attention and -selection play a decisive . part ; and although they nowhere add any new material to the space-data of sense, they so shuffle and manipulate these data and hide present ones 1 behind imagined ones that it -is no wonder if some authors Jihave gone so far as to think that the -sense-data have no ' spatial worth at all, and that the intellect, since it makes the .', subdivisions, also gives the spatial quality to them out of resources of its own. t, To make clear what the problem of finding order, the problem of subdivision and synthesis, is, let us begin by .supposing a, .creature with several sense-organs, each of 'which yields its own vaguely extensive feeling. (This

ov * Musical tones, e.g., have an order of quality independent either of their space- or time-order. Music comes from the. time-order of. the nates upsetting their quality-order. In general, if ab c d ef g h ij k, <c., stand for an arrangement of feelings in the order of their quality, they may as- sume any space-order or time-order, as d ef a h gr, cfrc., and still the order of quality will remain fixed and unchanged.