164 PSYCHOLOGY. 



And witli this we can close tlie first great division ol 

 our subject. We have shown that, within the range of 



double, by opening the other eye, the number of retinal points affected, 

 the new retinal sensations do not as a rule appear alongside of the 

 old ones and additional to them, but merely make the old ones seem 

 larger and nearer. Why should the affection of new points on the S(i7ne 

 retina have so different a result? In fact, he will see no sort of logical 

 connection between (1) the original separate local signs, (2) the line as a 

 unit, (3) the line with the points discriminated in it, and (4) the various- 

 nerve-processes which subserve all these diHerent things. He will suspect 

 our local sign of being a very slippery and ambiguous sort of creature. 

 Positionless at tirst, it no sooner appears in the midst of a gang of compan- 

 ions than it is found maintaining the strictest position of its own, and as- 

 signing place to each of its associates. How is this possible V Must we 

 accept what we rejected a while ago as absurd, and admit the points each 

 to have position i7i se ? Or must we suspect that our whole construction 

 has been fallacious, and that we have tried to conjure up, out of association, 

 qualities which the associates never contained? 



There is no doubt a real difficulty here; and the shortest way of dealing 

 with it would be to confess it insoluble and ultimate. Even if position be 

 not an intrinsic character of any one of those sensations we have called 

 local signs, we must still admit that there is something about every one of 

 them that stands for the potentiality of position, and is the ground why the 

 local sign, when it gets placed at all, gets placed 7te?-e rather than there. If this 

 ' something ' be interpreted as a physiological something, as a mere nerve- 

 process, it is easy to say in a blank way that when it is excited alone, it is 

 an 'ultimate fact '(1) that a positionless spot will appear; that when it is 

 excited together with other similar processes, but witJiout [Vae process of 

 discriminative attention, it is another ' ultimate fact ' (2) that a unitary line 

 will come; and that the final 'ultimate fact' (3) is that, when the nerve- 

 process is excited in combination with that other process which subserves 

 the feeling of attention, what results will be the line with the local sign 

 inside of it determined to a particular place. Thus we should escape the 

 responsibility of explaining, by falling back on the everlasting inscruta- 

 bility of the psycho-neural nexus. The moment we call the ground of lo- 

 calization physiological, we need only point out hoio, in those cases in 

 which localization occurs, the physiological process differs from those in 

 which it does not, to have done all we can possibly do in the matter. This 

 would be unexceptionable logic, and with it we might let the matter drop, 

 satisfied that there was no self-contradiction in it, but only the universal 

 psychological puzzle of how a new mode of consciousness emerges when- 

 ever a fundamentally new mode of nervous action occurs. 



But, blameless as such tactics would logically be on our part, let us see 

 whether we cannot push our theoretic insight a little farther. It seems to 

 me we can. We cannot, it is true, give a reason why the line we feel when 

 process (2) awakens should have its own peculiar shape; nor can we explain 

 the essence of the process of discriminative attention. But we can see 

 why, if the brute facts be admitted that a line may have one of its parts 

 singled out by attention at all, and that that part may appear in relation to 



