488 PSYCH0L0O7. 



object again in its pristine unity ; and so prominent may 

 our consciousness of its composition be, that we may hardly 

 believe that it ever could have appeared undivided. But 

 this is an erroneous view, the undeniable fact being that 

 any number of impressions, from any niuaher of sensory sources, 

 falling simultaneously on a mind which has not yet experi- 

 enced THEM SEPARATELY, imll fuse luto a single undivided ob- 

 ject for that mind. The law is that all things fuse that can 

 fuse, and nothing separates except what must. AVliat makes 

 impressions separate we have to study in this chapter. 

 Although they separate easier if they come in through dis- 

 tinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional 

 ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see. 

 The baby, assailed b}' eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails 

 at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confu- 

 sion ; and to the very end of life, our location of all things 

 in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or 

 bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at 

 once, coalesced together into one and the same space. 

 There is no other reason than this why "the hand I touch 

 and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately 

 feel." * 



It is true that we may sometimes be temj^ted to exclaim, 

 when once a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object lie 

 before us, " How could we ever have been ignorant of these 

 things and yet have felt the object, or drawn the conclusion, 

 as if it were a continuum, a pleiium? There would have 

 been gaps — but we felt no gaps ; wherefore we must have seen 

 and heard these details, leaned upon these steps ; they must 

 have been operative upon our minds, just as they are now, only 

 unconsciously, or at least inattentively. Our first unanalyzed 

 sensation was really composed of these elementary sensa- 

 tions, our first rapid conclusion was really based on these 

 intermediate inferences, all the while, only we failed to note 

 the fact." But this is nothing but the fatal ' psychologists fal- 

 lacy ' (p. 196) of treating an inferior state of mind as if it 

 must somehow know implicitly all that is explicitly known 



* Jlontgomery in ' Mind, ' x. 527 Cf. also Lipps : Grundtatsacben des 

 Seeleulebeus. p. 579 ff. , and see below, Chapter XIX. 



