DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 521 



each contributory sensation is felt in the whole, and is a co-determinant 

 of what the whole shall be, but does not attract the attention to its 

 separate self] "may suffice to show the vital part which the direction 

 of attention and practice in observing play in sense-perception. To 

 apply this now to the ear. The ordinary task which our ear has to 

 solve when many sounds assail it at once is to discern the voices of the 

 several sounding bodies or instruments engaged ; beyond this it has no 

 objective interest in analyzing. We wish to know, when many men are 

 speaking together, what each one says, when many instruments and 

 voices combine, which melody is executed by each. Any deeper 

 analysis, such as that of each separate note into its partial tones 

 (although it might be performed by the same means and faculty of 

 hearing as the first analysis) would tell us nothing new about the 

 sources of sound actually present, but might lead us astray as to their 

 number. For this reason we confine our attention in analyzing a mass 

 of sound to the several instruments' voices, and expressly abstain, as it 

 were, from discriminating the elementary components of the latter. In 

 this last sort of discrimination we are as unpractised as we are, on the 

 contrary, well trained in the former kind." * 



* Tonempfindungen, Dritte Auflage, pp. 103-107.— The reader who 

 has assimilated the contents of our Chapter V, above, will doubtless 

 have remarked that the illustrious physiologist has fallen, in these para- 

 graphs, into that sort of interpretation of the facts which we there 

 tried to prove erroneous. Helmholtz, however, is no more careless than 

 most psychologists in confounding together the object perceived, the 

 organic conditions of the perception, and the sensations which tcould 

 be e.xcited by the several parts of the object, or by the several organic 

 conditions, provided they came into action separately or were separately 

 attended to, and in assuming that what is true of any one of these sorts of 

 fact must be true of the other sorts also If each organic condition or part 

 of the object is there, its sensation, he thinks, must be there also, only in 

 a 'synthetic' — which is indistinguishable from what the authors whom we 

 formerly reviewed called an ' imconscious ' — state. I will not repeat argu- 

 ments sutiicieutly detailed in the earlier chapter (see especial!}^ pp. 170-176), 

 but simply say that what he calls the ' fusion of many sensations into one' 

 is really the production of one sensation by the co-operation of nvAny organic 

 conditions; and that what perception fails to discriminate (when it is 

 ' sj^nthetic ') is not serisations already existent but not singled out, but new 

 objective/ac^s, judged truer than the facts already synthetically perceived — 

 two views of the solid body, many harmonic tones, instead of one view and 

 one tone, states of the eyeball-muscles thitherto unknown, and the like. 

 These new facts, when first discovered, are known in states of conscious- 

 ness never till that moment exactly realized before, states of consciousness 

 which at the same time judge them to be determinations of the same 

 matter of fact which was previously realized. All that Helmholtz says of 

 the conditions which hinder and further analysis applies just as naturally 

 to the analysis, through the advent of new feelings, of objects into their ele 



