Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/41

 28 PKOF. W. JAMES I in a blank way that, when it is excited alone, it is an ' ulti- mate fact ' (1) that the separate feeling of positionless spot will result ; that when it is excited together with other similar processes, but without the process of discriminative attention, it is another ' ultimate fact ' (2) that the feeling of unitary line will come ; and that the final ' ultimate fact ' (3) is that, when the nerve-process is excited in combination with that other process which subserves the feeling of attention, what results will be the line with the local-sign inside of it determined to a particular place. Thus we should escape the responsibility of explaining, by falling back on the con- fessed inscrutability of the psycho-neural nexus in all cases. The moment we call the ground of localisation physiological, we need only point out how, in those cases in which localisa- tion occurs, the physiological process differs from those in which it does not, to have done all we can possibly do in the matter. This would be unexceptionable logic, and with it we might let the matter drop, satisfied that there was no self-contradiction in it, but only the universal psychological puzzle of how a new mode of consciousness emerges when- ever a fundamentally new mode of nervous action occurs. 1 But, blameless as such tactics would logically be on our part, let us see whether we cannot push our theoretic insight a little farther. It seems to me we can. We cannot, it is true, give a reason why the line we feel when process (2) awakens should have its own peculiar shape ; nor can we explain the essence of the process of discriminative attention. But we can see why, if the brute facts be admitted that a line may have one of its parts singled out by attention at all, and that that part may appear in relation to other parts at all, the relation must be in the line itself, for the line and the parts are the only things supposed to be in consciousness. And we can furthermore suggest a reason why parts appear- ing thus in relation to each other in a line should fall into an immutable order, and each within that order keep its characteristic place. If a lot of such local-signs all have any quality which evenly augments as we pass from one to the other, we can arrange them in an ideal serial order, in which any one local- sign must lie below those with more, above those with less, 1 The reader will please remember that when we began to give our account of the matter, we said nothing of association, which is a psychic law, but spoke only of the " law of habit in the nervous system ". This might easily bring it about, that a point, positionless through nerve-process (1), should appear embedded in a line through nerve-process (2), and finally should start out from a particular part of that line through nerve-process (3).