42 PSYCHOLOGY. 



know under that name. We think of ' the ground ' as being 

 there and giving us the sensation of this kind of movement. 

 The sensation, we say, comes/rom the ground. The ground's 

 place seems to be its place ; although at the same time, 

 and for very similar practical reasons, we think of another 

 optical and tactile object, ' the hand ' namely, and consider 

 that its place also must be the place of our sensation. In 

 other words, we take an object or sensible content A, and 

 confounding it with another object otherwise known, B, or 

 with two objects otherwise known, B and C, we identify its 

 place with their places. But in all this tliere is no 'project- 

 ing ' (such as the extradition-philosophers talk of) of A out 

 of an original place ; no primitive location which it first 

 occujiied, aioay from these other sensations, has to be con- 

 tradicted ; no natural ' centre,' from which it is expelled, 

 exists. That would imply that A aboriginally came to us 

 in definite local relations with other sensations, for to be 

 out of B and C is to be in local relation with them as much 

 as to be mthem is so. But it was no more out of B and C 

 than it was in them when it first came to us. It simply 

 had nothing to do with them. To say that we feel a sen- 

 sation's seat to be ' in the brain ' or ' against the eye ' or 

 * under the skin ' is to say as much about it and to deal 

 with it in as non-primitive a way as to say that it is a mile 

 off. These are all secondary perceptions, ways of defining 

 the sensation's seat per aliud. They involve numberless 

 associations, identifications, and imaginations, and admit a 

 great deal of vacillation and uncertainty in the result.* 



I conclude, then, that there is no truth in the ' eccentric pro- 

 jection ' theory. It is due to the confused assumption that 

 the bodily processes which cause a sensation must also be 

 its seat, f But sensations have no seat in this sense. They 



* The intermediary and shortened locations of the lost hand and foot in 

 the amputation cases also show this. It is easy to see why the phantom 

 foot might continue to follow the position of the artificial one. But I 

 confess that I cannot explain its half way-positions. 



•f- It is from this confused assumption that the time-honored riddle 

 comes, of how, with an upside-down picture on the retina, we can see 

 things right-side up. Our consciousness is naively supposed to inhabit the 



