554 



SCIENCJE 



[Vol. II., No. 38. 



wli.y the hyoid bones do not articulate at all 

 with the skull, whj' the malleus is outside the 

 ear, and wh^- there is apparentl}' but oue os- 

 sicle in the tjTiipanum , of the particular shape 

 shown in fig. 3. 



( To he continued.) 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM OF 

 DIRECTION. 



Were it admissible that one person should 

 add to the work of a living author, I might 

 call this paper a supplement to Mr. Francis 

 Galton's Human faculty-. My object is to 

 explain the subjective mechanism by which I 

 preserve the consciousness of direction. How 

 far others adopt the same mechanism, I am 

 not fully aware, but am inclined to think that 

 what is fundamentally the same system is 

 emploj-ed by nearly every one ; but I doubt 

 whether the details are alwaj's the same, and 

 the matter appears of sufficient interest to be 

 discussed. 



To be conscious which waj' he is going, one 

 must keep in mind some sj^stem of directions. 

 It is true, that, so far as finding one's waj^ about 

 in a place with which he is fully acquainted is 

 concerned, no attention to direction is neces- 

 sary. One knows that he must turn here to 

 the right, and there to the left, and must follow 

 certain familiar paths, all of which he can do 

 without attending to direction. It is probable 

 that most animals, and possible that some men, 

 have no system except this. Regarding such 

 a limitation as exceptional, we must suppose 

 that in general, men, in going about, have 

 constantlj^ in mind an idea, that they are going 

 in a certain definable direction. A direction 

 can, however, be defined only bj- reference to 

 the direction of some line taken as a standard 

 of reference ; and it is this standard of refer- 

 ence, as I have always employed it, which I 

 shall now describe. 



I. I continuallj' carrj' around with me a con- 

 ception of four horizontal lines, which I shall 

 call co-ordinates, going out in four cardinal 

 du'ections. I shall call these directions east, 

 west, north, and south ; but it must be under- 

 stood that thej' have no necessary relation to 

 the actual pioints of the compass, being purely 

 subjective. This system of co-ordinates is 

 emploj'ed, I think, by most or all men. 



II. These four cardinal directions are con- 

 ceived of as absolute directions, and not as 

 defined relatively to any particular line on the 

 earth' s surface. They have remained unchanged 

 since the earliest memories of childhood. To 

 be more explicit, the ideal or subjective west 



is the direction in which I was facing, when, as 

 a child, ni_v father explained to mc wliich was 

 the right hand, and which the left ; the ideal 

 north is the direction towards which my light 

 side was then turned ; the ideal south, that 

 towards which the left side was turned : while 

 east was behind my back. 



I have always since imagined myself as con- 

 scious of these four absolute directions, and 

 therefore at anj- moment can face as I imagine 

 mj-self to have been facing on the occasion 

 referred to. I do not know whether the co- 

 ordinates have the same absolute character with 

 other men, but think it highly probable that 

 they do, since absolute directions must be more 

 easil.y thought of than relative ones. 



III. With some limitations, to be soon re- 

 ferred to, the sj'stem of directions is quite inde- 

 pendent of the will. Once fixed in a place, a 

 street, or a house, thej" are an inseparable com- 

 ponent of the situation, and forever unalterable 

 so long as the identitj- of the place is recognized. 

 Once in a room of which I conceive a certain 

 side to be the absolute west, b}' no act of the 

 will, and by no consciousness that some other 

 side is the west, can I change the subjective 

 impression. Of course, however, one is liable 

 on going into a strange place, or on walking 

 about without sufficient attention, to be mis- 

 taken as to his direction ; and thus I am subject 

 to a kind of trouble or confusion which I never 

 heard anj^ one else describe, and which, there- 

 fore, I can hardlj' supj)ose to be universal. 

 Some instances will illustrate the matter better 

 than general statements. 



I recently went to a hotel in Paris, where I 

 had stopped eight years before. While driv- 

 ing into the court, and just as the carriage was 

 stopping, ray attention was momentarily occu- 

 pied in speaking to one of the attendants. 

 Getting out of tlae carriage, I remarked, as I 

 supposed, that the offices of the hotel had aU 

 been moved from the north to the west side of 

 the court. I may anticipate by saying that 

 this was an illusion arising from the very mi- 

 nute circumstance that the carriage, during 

 the moment that I was speaking to the attend- 

 ant, had turned at a right angle from facing 

 north to facing east ; but being unconscious of 

 this change, and not looking around the court, 

 I supposed that the carriage was still du'ected 

 towards the ideal north. I entered the eleva- 

 tor, was carried to an upper stor}-, shown 

 through several long passages, and into a 

 room, preserving the changed system of co- 

 ordinates of which I was entirely unconscious. 

 Had it been my first visit to the hotel, no con- 

 fusion would have resulted, since every thing 



