646 PSYCHOLOGY. 



These assumptions are all peculiarly fragile. To begin 

 with, the mental fact which in the experiments corresjjouds 

 to the increase of the stimulus is not an enlarged sensation, 

 but a judgment that the sensation is enlarged. What Fech- 

 ner calls the * sensation ' is what appears to the mind as 

 the objective phenomenon of light, warmth, weight, sound, 

 impressed part of body, etc. Fechner tacitly if not openly 

 assumes that such a judgment of increase consists in the 

 simple fact that an increased number of sensation-units 

 are present to the mind; and that the judgment is thus 

 itself a quantitatively bigger mental thing when it judges 

 large differences, or differences between large terms, than 

 when it judges small ones. But these ideas are really 

 absurd. The hardest sort of judgment, the judgment 

 which strains the attention most (if that be any criterion 

 of the judgment's ' size '), is that about the smallest things 

 and differences. But really it has no meaning to talk 

 about one judgment being bigger than another. And 

 even if we leave out judgments and talk of sensations 

 only, we have already found ourselves (in Chapter YI) 

 quite unable to read any clear meaning into the notion that 

 they are masses of units combined. To introspection, our 

 feeling of pink is surely not a j)ortion of our feeling of 

 scarlet ; nor does the light of an electric arc seem to con- 

 tain that of a tallow-candle in itself. Compound things 

 contain parts ; and one such thing may have twice or three 

 times as many parts as another. But when we take a sim- 

 ple sensible quality like light or sound, and say that there 

 is now twice or thrice as much of it j)resent as there was 

 a moment ago, although we seem to mean the same thing 

 as if we were talking of compound objects, we really mean 

 something different. We mean that if we were to arrange 

 the various possible degrees of the qualit}'" in a scale of 

 serial increase, the distance, interval, or difference betAveen 

 the stronger and the weaker sj)ecimen before us would 

 seem about as great as that between the weaker one and 

 the beginning of the scale. It is these relations, these dis- 

 tance^, ivhich ice are measuring ami not the composition of the 

 qualities themselves, as Fechner thinks. Whilst if we turn 

 to objects which are divisible, surely a big object may be 

 known in a little thought. Introspection shows moreover 



