THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 187 



the quality of lateral spreadoutness, as our attention passes 

 from one extent of them to another, awakened by an object 

 sliding along. Usually the moving object is our hand ; 

 and feelings of movement in our joints invariably accom- 

 pany the feelings in the skin. But the feeling of the skin 

 is what the blind man means by his skin ; so the size of the 

 skin-feelings stands as the absolute or real size, and the 

 size of the joint-feelings becomes a sign of these. Suppose, 

 for example, a blind baby with (to make the description 

 shorter) a blister on his toe, exploring his leg with his 

 finger-tip and feeling a pain shoot up sharply the instant 

 the blister is touched. The experiment gives him four 

 different kinds of sensation — two of them protracted, two 

 sudden. The first pair are the movement-feeling in the 

 joints of the ujjper limb, and the movement-feeling on 

 the skin of the leg and foot. These, attended to together, 

 have their extents identified as one objective space — 

 the hand moves through the same space in which the 

 leg lies. The second pair of objects are the pain in the 

 blister, and the peculiar feeling the blister gives to the 

 finger. Their spaces also fuse ; and as each marks the end 

 of a peculiar movement-series (arm moved, leg stroked), 

 the movement-spaces are emphatically identified with each 

 other at tJiat end. Were there other small blisters dis- 

 tributed down the leg, there would be a number of these 

 emphatic points ; the movement-spaces would be iden- 

 tified, not only as totals, but point for point. * 



* The incoherence of the different primordial sense-spaces inter se 

 is often made a pretext for denying to the primitive bodily feelings any 

 spatial quality at all. Nothing is commoner than to hear it said : "Babies 

 have originally no spatial perception ; for when a baby's toe aches he does 

 not place the pain in the toe. He makes no definite movements of defence, 

 and may be vaccinated without being held." The facts are true enough ; 

 but the interpretation is all wrong. What really happens is that the baby 

 does not place his ' toe ' in the pain ; for he knows nothing of his ' toe ' as 

 yet. He has not attended to it as a visual object ; he has not handled it 

 with his fingers ; nor have its normal organic sensations or contacts yet 

 become interesting enough to be discriminated from the whole massive 

 feeling of the foot, or even of the leg to which it belongs. In short, the 

 toe is neither a member of the babe's optical space, of his hand-movement 

 space, nor an independent member of his leg-and-foot space. It has ac- 

 tually no mental existence yet save as this little pain-space. What wonder, 



