a78 PSYCHOLOGY. 



intelligibly make them so. Wundt's tlieory is, in short, 

 but an avowal of impotence, and an appeal to the inscru- 

 table powers of the soul.* It confesses that we cannot 

 analyze the constitution or give the genesis of the spatial 

 quality in consciousness. But at the same time it says the 

 antecedents thereof are psychical and not cerebral facts. 

 In calling the quality in question a sensational quality, our 

 own account equally disclaimed ability to analyze it, but 

 said its antecedents were cerebral, not psychical — in other 

 words, that it was & first psychical thing. This is merely 

 a question of probable fact, which the reader may decide. 



And now what shall be said of Helmholtz ? Can I find 

 fault with a book which, on the whole, I imagine to be one 

 of the four or five greatest monuments of human genius in 

 the scientific line? If truth impels I must fain trj-, and 

 take the risks. It seems to me that Helmholtz's genius 

 moves most securely when it keeps close to particular facts. 

 At any rate, it shows least strong in purely speculative 

 passages, which in the Optics, in spite of many beauties, 

 seem to me fundamentally vacillating and obscure. The 

 'empiristic' view which Helmholtz defends is that the 

 space-determinations we perceive are in every case pro- 

 ducts of a process of unconscious inference, f The infer- 

 ence is similar to one from induction or analogy. X We al- 

 ways see that form before us which habitually would have 

 caused the sensation we now have. § But the latter sensa- 

 tion can never be intrinsically spatial, or its intrinsic space- 

 determinations would never be overcome as they are so 

 often by the ' illusory ' space-determinations it so often 

 suggests. II Since the illusory determination can be traced 

 to a suggestion of Experience, the ' real ' one must also be 

 such a suggestion : so that all space intuitions are due sole- 



* Why talk of ' genetic theories ' ? when we have in the next breath to 

 write as Wundt does: ' ' If then we must regard the intuition of space as a 

 product that simply emerges from the conditions of our mental and physi- 

 cal organization, nothing need stand in the way of our designating it asone 

 of the a priori functions with which consciousness is endowed." (Logik, 

 n. 460.) 



t P. 430. t Pp- 430, 449. § P. 428. i P. 442. 



