THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 81 



any word on tliis page. He will soon begin to wonder if it 

 can possibly be the word lie has been using all his life with 

 that meaning. It stares at him from the paper like a glass 

 eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is indeed there, but 

 its soul is fled. It is reduced, by this new way of attending 

 to it, to its sensational nudity. We never before attended to 

 it in this way, but habitually got it clad with its meaning 

 the moment we caught sight of it, and rapidly passed from 

 it to the other words of the phrase. We apprehended it, 

 in short, wdth a cloud of associates, and thus jjerceiviiig it, 

 we felt it quite otherwise than as we feel it now divested 

 and alone. 



Another well-known change is Avhen we look at a land- 

 scape with our head upside down. Perception is to a cer- 

 tain extent baffled by this manoeuvre ; gradations of dis- 

 tance and other space-determinations are made uncertain ; 

 the reproductive or associative jDrocesses, in short, decline ; 

 and, simultaneously with their diminution, the colors grow 

 richer and more varied, and the contrasts of light and shade 

 more marked. The same thing occurs when we turn a 

 painting bottom upward. We lose much of its meaning, 

 but, to compensate for the loss, we feel more freshly the 

 value of the mere tints and shadings, and become aware of 

 any lack of purely sensible harmony or balance which they 

 may show.* Just so, if we lie on the floor and look up at 

 the mouth of a person talking behind us. His lower lip 

 here takes the habitual place of the upper one upon our 

 retina, and seems animated by the most extraordinary and 

 unnatural mobility, a mobility which now strikes us be- 

 cause (the associative processes being disturbed by the un- 

 accustomed point of view) we get it as a naked sensation 

 and not as part of a familiar object perceived. 



On a later page other instances will meet us. For the 

 present these are enough to prove our point. Once more 

 we find ourselves driven to admit that when qualities of an 

 object impress our sense and we thereupon perceive the 

 object, the sensation as such of those qualities does not 



* Cf. Helmholtz, Optik, pp. 433, 723, 728, 772 , aud Spencer, Psychol- 

 ogy, vol, II. p. 249, note. 



