Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/43

 30 PROF. W. JAMES I THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. (l.) And with this we can close the first great division of our subject. We have shown that, within the range of every sense, experience takes ab initio the spatial form. We have also shown that in the cases of the retina and skin every sensible total may be subdivided by discriminative attention into sensible parts, which are also spaces, and into relations between the parts, these being sensible spaces too. Further- more, we have seen that different parts, once discriminated, necessarily fall into a determinate order, both by reason of definite gradations in their quality, and (in a footnote) by reason of the fixed order of time-succession which voluntary attention must follow in its movements when it passes from one to another of them. But in all this nothing has been said of the comparative measurement of one sensible space-total against another, or of the way in which, by summing our divers simple sensible space-experiences together, we end by constructing what we regard as the unitary, continuous and infinite objective Space of the real world. To this more difficult inquiry we next pass. (To ~be continued.) admission of the ' ultimate fact ' that this collective excitement shall feel like a line and nothing else, it can never be explained why the new order should needs be an order of positions, and not of an altogether different sort. We shall hereafter have any amount of opportunity to observe how thoroughgoing is the participation of motion in all our spatial measure- ments. Whether the local-signs have their respective qualities evenly graduated or not, the feelings of transition must be set down as among the vercK causce in localisation. But the gradation of the local-signs is hardly to be doubted ; so we may believe ourselves really to possess two sets of reasons for localising any point we may happen to distinguish from out the midst of any line or any larger space.