CHAPTER V 



SPACE AND TIME 



^ I. — Space as a Mode of Perception 



In our second chapter (p. 63) we saw that the distinction 

 between " inside " and " outside " ourselves was not a very 

 real or well-defined one. Certain of the vast complex of 

 our sense-impressions we term inside, others again we 

 term outside. To a savage the beginning of outside, the 

 limit to self, is undoubtedly his skin ; although on occasion 

 he may extend the idea of self farther, and be peculiarly 

 careful of what becomes of such outward-lying portions of 

 self as nail-parings and hair-clippings. The skin seems 

 to him to bound off self from an outside world of non- 

 self. The group of sense-impressions which he calls skin 

 marks off a world which he can see and feel from one 

 which in the normal condition is inaccessible to sight or 

 touch. His first experiences of pain arise, or at least are 

 perpetuated, from something within this invisible and in- 

 tangible world, and the nerve-vibrations, which he classifies 

 as pain, he postulates as inside self; his indigestion does 

 not seem immediately associated with the visible and 

 tangible world outside his skin. Thus the sense-impres- 

 sion pain, even when associated later with a group of 

 other sense-impressions classified as those of sight and 

 touch, is still differentiated from them as something 

 especially internal. I receive for a moment, and then 

 they vanish, the feelings of hardness and pain ; both may 

 come to the seat of my consciousness as nerve-vibrations, 

 or even by the same nerve-vibration ; both are associated 



