180 PSYCHO LOOT. 



table I overlook the fact tliat the farther plates and glasses 

 feel so much smaller than my own, for I hnoio that they are 

 all equal in size ; and the feeling of them, which is a present 

 sensation, is eclipsed in the glare of the knowledge, which 

 is a merely imagined one. 



If the inconsistencies of sight-spaces inter se can thus be 

 reduced, of course there can be no difficulty in equating 

 eight-spaces with spaces given to touch. In this equation 

 it is probably the touch-feeling which prevails as real and 

 the sight which serves as sign — a reduction made necessary 

 not only by the far greater constancy of felt over seen 

 magnitudes, but by the greater practical interest which the 

 sense of touch possesses for our lives. As a rule, things 

 only benefit or harm us by coming into direct contact with 

 our skin : sight is only a sort of anticipatory touch ; the 

 latter is, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, the 'mother-tongue of 

 thought,' and the handmaid's idiom must be translated 

 into the language of the mistress before it can speak clearly 

 to the mind.* 



Later on we shall see that the feelings excited in the 

 joints when a limb moves are used as signs of the path 

 traversed by the extremity. But of this more anon. As 

 for the equating of sound-, smell-, and taste-volumes with 

 those yielded by the more discriminative senses, they are 

 too vague to need any remark. It may be observed of 

 pain, however, that its size has to be reduced to that of the 

 normal tactile size of the organ which is its seat. A finger 

 with a felon on it, and the pulses of the arteries therein, both 

 'feel ' larger than we believe they really 'are.' 



* Prof. Jastiow gives as the result of bis experiments this general 

 conclusion (Am. Journal of Psychology, iii. 53) : "The space-perceptions 

 of disparate senses are themselves disparate, and whatever harmony 

 there is amongst them we are warranted in regarding as the result 

 of experience. The spacial notions of one deprived of the sense of sight 

 and reduced to the use of the other space-senses must indeed be different 

 from our own." But be continues: "The existence of the striking 

 disparities between our visual and our other space-perceptions without 

 confusing us, and, indeed, without usually being noticed, can only be 

 explained by the tendency to interpret all dimensions into tJieir visual 

 equivalents." But this author gives no reasons for saying ' visual ' rather 

 than ' tactile ;' and I must continue to think that probabilities point the 

 other way so far as what we call real magnitudes are concerned. 



