Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/555

 542 w. JAMES : rest and motion, in short the foundations of the objective world. This is only possible through Space, Time and Causalitj*. . . being preformed in the Intellect itself. . . from whence it again follows that the per- ception of the external world is essentially an intellectual process, a work of the Understanding, to which sensation furnishes merely the occasion, and the data to be interpreted in each particular case." 1 I call this view mythological, because I am conscious of no such Kantian machine-shop in my mind, and feel no call to disparage the powers of poor sensation in this merciless way. I have no introspective experience of mentally producing or creating space. My space-intuitions occur not in two times but in one. There is not one moment of passive inextensive sensation, succeeded by another of active extensive perception, but the form I see is as immediately felt as the colour which fills it out. That the higher parts of the mind come in, who can deny ? They aggregate and summate, they equate and measure, they reproduce and abstract. They inweave the space-sensations with intellectual relations ; but these relations are the same when they obtain between the elements of the space-system, as when they obtain between any of the other elements of which the world is made. The essence of the Kantian contention is that there are not spaces, but Space one infinite continuous Unit and that our knowledge of this cannot be a piecemeal sensational affair, produced by summation and abstraction. To which the obvious reply is that, if any known thing bears on its front the appearance of piecemeal construction and abstrac- tion, it is this very notion of the infinite unitary space of the world. It is a notion, if ever there was one ; and no intuition. Most of us apprehend it in the barest symbolic abridgment : and if perchance we ever do try to make it more adequate, we just add one image of sensible extension to another until we are tired. Most of us are obliged to turn round and drop the thought of the space in front of us when we think of that behind. And the space represented as near to us seems more minutely subdivisible than that we think of as lying far away. The other prominent German writers on space are also 'psychical stimulists '. Herbart, whose influence has been widest, says " the resting eye sees no space," 2 and ascribes visual extension to the influence of movements combining with the non-spatial retinal feelings so as to form gradated series of the latter. A given sensation of such a series 1 Vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, pp. 52-7. 2 Psychol. als Wissenschafi, 111.