E. B. TITCHENER— ETHNOLOGICAL TESTS OF SENSATION. 211 



Islanders was a task of sensory interpretation ; they were not to get 

 a distinct perception of two separate points, but only "a sensation 

 perceptibly different from that yielded by a single point." I have 

 shown that they might have chosen any one of several perceptive 

 forms, and I have argued that different subjects did, as a matter of 

 fact, read different meanings into the instruction given. Their gen- 

 eral tendency toward a low limen I ascribe to that sensory interest, 

 that ingrained habit of interpretation of external stimuli, which 

 Rivers and Myers attest. They were to find a " sensation per- 

 ceptibly different " from another, and they carried the difference — 

 some of them — as low in the scale of separation as 2 mm. 



The Englishmen also read dift'erent meanings into the instruction 

 given. They were, however, as a group, less interested in the 

 minutiae of external stimuli than the savages ; their power of sensory 

 interpretation was less ; they paid, we may suppose, more attention to 

 the particular instrument used, and to its probable effect upon the skin. 

 They looked for a sensibly dual impression ; and though they did 

 not ah confine the judgment "two" to cases in which the stimuli 

 fell apart for perception, yet they naturally tended in that direction. 

 It is very significant that "among the Englishmen were five of the 

 educated class, and these gave a rather higher threshold than the 

 rest, who were all of the lower class. "^- The farther we go from the 

 savage's sensory interest and power of sensory interpretation, the 

 larger do our limens become ! Not, of course, that the educated 

 Englishmen were necessarily less sensitive than the rest, but simply 

 that they took " duality of impression " in a stricter sense. 



I conclude, then, that we have no right to say " of these Murray 

 men that their sense of touch is twice as delicate as that of English- 

 men." That may or may not be the case; but, in any event, the 

 conclusion does not follow from McDougall's experiments. So far 

 as relative " delicacy of tactile discrimination " is concerned, these 

 experiments leave us precisely where we were. 



I have tried to find a reasonable explanation of McDougall's re- 

 sults taken at their face value. I have now to express a complete 

 distrust of his formal procedure. The "test" of the Murray Is- 



1- R, 192. 



