Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/559

 546 w. JAMES : momentous sentence, he speaks of sensations of touch as if they might be the original material of our space-percepts which thus, from the optical point of view " may be assumed as given}- Of course the eye-man has a right to fall back on the skin- man to help him at a pinch. But this means that he is a mere eye-man and not a complete psychologist. In other words, Helmholtz's Optics and the " empiristic theory" there professed are not to be understood as attempts at answering the general question of how space-consciousness enters the mind. They simply deny that it enters with the first optical sensations. 2 Our own account has affirmed stoutly that it enters then ; but no more than Helmholtz have we pretended to show why. Who calls a thing a first sensation admits he has no theory of its production. Helmholtz, though all the while without an articulate theory, makes the world think he has one. He beautifully traces the immense part which reproductive processes play in our vision of space, and never except in that one pitiful little sentence about touch does he tell us just what it is they reproduce. He limits himself to denying that they reproduce originals of a visual sort. And, so difficult is the subject, and so magically do catch- words work on the popular-scientist ear, that most likely, had he written ' sensationalistic ' instead of ' nativistic,' and 1 spiritualistic ' instead of ' empiristic ' (which synonyms Hering suggests), numbers of his present empirical evolu- tionary followers would fail to find in his teaching any- thing worthy of praise. But since he wrote otherwise, they hurrah for him as a sort of second Locke, dealing another deathblow at the old bugaboo of ' innate ideas '. His 1 nativistic ' adversary Hering, they probably imagine Heaven save the mark ! to be a scholastic in modern dis- guise. After Wundt and Helmholtz, the most important anti-sen- sationalist space-philosopher in Germany is Prof. Lipps, whose deduction of space from an order of non-spatial diffe- rences, continuous yet separate, is a wonderful piece of sub- tlety and logic. And yet he has to confess that continuous differences form in the first instance only a logical series, which need not appear spatial, and that wherever it does so 1 Bottom of page 797. 2 In fact, to borrow a simile from Prof. G. S. Miiller (Theorie der sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, p. 38), the various senses bear in the Helmholtzian philo- sophy of perception the same relation to the * object ' perceived by their means, that a troop of jolly drinkers bear to the landlord's bill, when no one has any money, but each hopes that one of the rest will pay. .