Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/88

74 the sensation simple. Of the origin of the perception, a psychological (fusion) and a physiological (summation) theory are possible. The writer concludes that sensation is a simplest sense-idea (presentation or representation), attended (getragen) by the consciousness of one's own mental activity; perception is a complex sense-idea, in which the part played by the subject normally retires into the background. Exceptionable in these descriptions are, firstly, the separation of act and content, alluded to above; secondly, the unexplained passage from inner to outer (which surely is the repudiated Helmholtz passage? ) and from simple to complex; and thirdly, their cumbrousness. What we want is a working definition; and this is given by the view which regards sensation as the simplest mental concomitant of the excitation of a definite bodily organ.

A second section deals with the properties of sensation. A sensation may not be regarded as a magnitude, for it cannot be expressed in the form xn. Its intensity is not quantity; its quality is not spatial. True: but are the possibilities exhausted? Dr. Dessoir, like every one else, makes unhesitating use of liminal values. — Intensity may attach to the simple sensation, quality only to sensation-complexes. The arguments alleged to support this position do not seem to me to be adequate. As regards sensible feeling, the writer appears to have misunderstood Professor Stumpf’s remarks. What the latter attempts is not the reduction of feeling-tone to quality and intensity of. sensation, but the reduction of 'color' to these elements. Such a reduction involves, as he sees, the separation of feeling-tone from color. For the rest, it is, perhaps, more correct to make feeling-tone dependent on quality and intensity of stimulus than on those of sensation.

There follows a short account of concomitant and after-sensations. Concomitant sensations are: I. Consensations : (i) homogeneous: (1) adjunctive (spread of tickling); (2) double (touch); (3) transferred (shoulder-pains in liver disease); (ii) heterogeneous (slate-pencil shiver). II. Attendant sensations (fusions). III. Secondary memory-images (colored hearing). IV. Reflex sensations; reflex movement causes kinogeneous sensations: (i) stimulation unnoticed (colic); (ii) stimulation noticed (cough and pleuritic pain). — The synergic sensations (binocular, biaural) are, curiously enough, passed over. Groups II. and III. appear rather to present sub-forms of one type than separate types. Group IV. stands, of course, on quite a different level from that of the other groups.

After-sensations are (a) continuous, (b) intermittent. Qualitatively