Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/554

 THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. (IV.) 541 cause. At the same time the Understanding summons to its aid the form of the outer sense which similarly lies already preformed in the intellect (or brain), and which is Space, in order to locate that cause outside of the organism. ... In this process the Understanding, as I shall soon show, takes note of the most minute peculiarities of the given sensation in order to construct in the outer space a cause which shall completely account for them. This operation of the Understanding is, however, not one that takes place discursively, reflectively, in abstracto, by means of words and concepts ; but is intuitive and immediate. . . . Thus the Understand- ing must first create the objective world ; never can the latter, already complete in se, simply promenade into our heads through the senses and organic apertures. For the senses yield us nothing further than the raw material which must be first elaborated into the objective conception of an orderly physical world -system by means of the aforesaid simple forms of Space, Time and Causality. . . . Let me show the great chasm between sen- sation and perception by showing how raw the material is out of which the fair structure is upreared. Only two senses serve objective perception: touch and sight. They alone furnish the data on the basis whereof the Understanding, by the process indicated, erects the objective world. . . . These data in them- selves are still no perception ; that is the Understanding's work. If I press with my hand against the table, the sensation I receive has no analogy with the idea of the firm cohesion of the parts of this mass : only when my Understanding passes from the sensation to its cause, does it create for itself a body with the properties of solidity, impenetrability and hardness. When in the dark I lay my hand on a surface, or grasp a ball of three inches diameter, in either case the same parts of the hand receive the impression : but out of the different contraction of the hand in the two cases my Under- standing constructs the form of the body whose contact caused the feeling, and confirms its construction by leading me to move my hand over the body. If one born blind handles a cubical body, the sensations of his hand are quite uniform on all sides and in all directions, only the corners press upon a smaller part of his skin. In these sensations as such, there is nothing whatever analogous to a cube. But from the felt resistance his Understanding infers immediately and intuitively a cause thereof, which now presents itself as a solid body ; and from the movements of exploration which the arms made whilst the feelings of the hands remained constant, he constructs, in the space known to him a priori, the body's cubical shape. Did he not bring with him ready-made the idea of a cause and of a space, with the laws thereof, there never could arise, out of those successive feelings in his hand, the image of a cube. If we let a string run through our closed hand, we immediately construct as the cause of the friction and its duration in such an attitude of the hand, a long cylindrical body moving uniformly in one direction. But never out of the pure sen- sation in the hand could the idea of movement, that is, of change of posi- tion in space by means of time, arise : such a content can never lie in sen- sation, nor come out of it. Our Intellect, antecedently to all experience, must bear in itself the intuitions of Space and Time, and therewithal of the possibility of motion, and no less the idea of Causality, to pass from the empirically given feeling to its cause, and to construct the latter as a so moving body of the designated shape. For how great is the abyss between the mere sensation in the hand and the ideas of causality, materiality, and movement through Space, occurring in Time ! The feeling in the hand, even with different contacts and positions, is something far too uniform and poor in content for it to be possible to construct out of it, the idea of Space with its three dimensions, of the action of bodies on each other, with the properties of extension, impenetrability, cohesion, shape, hardness, softness,