Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/702

686 yearning after tactual terms. In philosophy, the Scottish school represents the same effort of thought to reduce reality to terms of touch. The real external world which this school of philosophy so bravely defends, and tries so hard to express, is not a world known by some inexplicable divine intuitive act of consciousness as they thought, but the single, and hitherto unattended to, phenomena of the special sense of touch. The criticism made by the realistic Scottish school upon the idealistic method of reflection is also psychological. They find that the whole system is based on an analogy of visual processes. In the sense of touch alone is sensation identical with belief, and Reid's 'intuition' or 'conception' of reality is just the specific sense of touch. Must we not admit the possibility of finding a similar psychological statement for the chief categories underlying all systems of philosophy, and the need of revising these systems in the light of such a psychological criticism?

When, in so-called association by similarity, a presentation is recalled through the recurrence in consciousness of one or more of its elements, both the recurring and the associated presentation being now together in consciousness, what was at first association through the common element becomes finally association by simultaneity. There are thus two stages of 'association by similarity.' These do not usually overlap, but rather association by contiguity, including both simultaneous and successive, tends to take the place of association through the common element. Against this reduction of association by similarity to association by contiguity, it is objected that while the above analysis may answer for complex presentation groups, the presentation of a single object can be reproduced only by similarity. And Höffding asserts that every contiguous association presupposes association by similarity, or at least immediate recognition. But closer examination of the nature of immediate recognition renders this proposition doubtful. It is unintelligible that pure similarity should occasion the knowledge that a presentation has been in consciousness before. And, as a matter of fact, there is in every case of associative reproduction an indefinite but incontestible feeling of difference between the present and the earlier sensation that prevents the fusion of the two. When the stimuli are the same, the difference-element is due to the fact that there exists no isolated sensation, and to the change in Geflihlston accompanying the heightened ease due to repetition. The latter would, however, be scarcely marked enough on the second recurrence to afford aid, and Lehmann's experiments show that confusion in the recognition of