Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/553

 540 w. JAMES : contained in the sensations associated and the dislike to allow spontaneous mental productivity, they flounder in a dismal dilemma. Mr. Sully joins them there in a vague and vacillating way. Mr. Spencer of course is bound to pretend to " evolve " all mental qualities out of antecedents different from themselves, so that we need perhaps not wonder at his refusal to accord the spatial quality to any of the several elementary sensations out of which our space perception grows. Thus (Psychology, ii., 168, 172, 218) : " No idea of extension can arise from a simultaneous excitation " of a multitude of nerve-terminations like those of the skin or the retina, since this would imply a " knowledge of their relative positions " that is, " a pre-existent idea of a special extension, which is absurd ". " No relation between successive states of consciousness gives in itself any idea of exten- sion." " The muscular sensations accompanying motion are quite distinct from the notions of space and time associated with them." Mr. Spencer none the less inveighs vociferously against the Kantian position that space is produced by the mind's own resources. And yet he nowhere denies space to be a specific affection of consciousness different from time ! Such incoherency is pitiful. The fact is that, at bottom, all these authors are really ' psychical stimulists,' or Kantists. The space they speak of is a super-sensational mental pro- duct. This position appears to me thoroughly mythological. But let us see how it is held by those who know more definitely what they mean. Schopenhauer expresses the Kantian view with more vigour and clearness than any one else. He says : " A man must be forsaken by all the gods to dream that the world we see outside of us, filling space in its three dimensions, moving down the inexorable stream of time, governed at each step by Causality's invariable law, but in all this only following rules which we may prescribe for it in advance of all experience, to dream and say that such a world should stand there outside of us, quite objectively real with no complicity of ours, and thereupon by a subsequent act, through the instrumentality of mere sensation, that it should enter our head and reconstruct a duplicate of itself as it was outside. For what a poverty-stricken thing is this mere sensation ! Even in the noblest organs of sense it is nothing more than a local and specific feeling, susceptible within its kind of a few variations, but always strictly subjective and containing in itself nothing objective, nothing re- sembling a perception. For sensation of every sort is and remains a process in the organism itself. . As such it is limited to the territory inside the skin and can never, accordingly, per se contain anything that lies outside the skin or outside ourselves. ". . . Only when the Understanding .... is roused to activity and brings its sole and only form, the law of Causality, into play, only then does the mighty transformation take place which makes out of subjective sensation objective intuition. The Understanding namely grasps by means of its innate, a priori, ante-experiential form, the given sensation of the body as an effect which as such must necessarily have a