280 P8T0H0L00T. 



first optical sensatious.* Our own account has affirmed 

 stoutly that it enters then ; but no more than Helmholtz 

 have we pretended to show why. Who calls a thing a first 

 sensation admits he has no theory of its production. Helm- 

 holtz, though all the while without an articulate theory, 

 makes the world think he has one. He beautifully traces 

 the immense part which reproductive processes play in our 

 vision of space, and never — except in that one pitiful little 

 sentence about touch — does he tell us just what it is they 

 reproduce. He limits himself to denying that they repro- 

 duce originals of a visual sort. And so difficult is the 

 subject, and so magically do catch-words work on the 

 popular-scientist ear, that most likely, had he written 

 ' physiological ' instead of ' uativistic,' and ' spiritualistic ' 

 instead of ' empiristic ' (which synonyms Hering suggests), 

 numbers of his present empirical evolutionary followers 

 would fail to find in his teaching anything worthy of praise. 

 But since he wrote otherwise, they hurrah for him as a sort 

 of second Locke, dealing another death-blow at the old 

 bugaboo of ' innate ideas.' His ' nativistic ' adversary 

 Hering they probably imagine — Heaven save the mark ! — 

 to be a scholastic in modern disguise. 



After AVundt and Helmholtz, the most important anti- 

 sensationalist space-philosopher in German}^ is Professor 

 Lipps, whose deduction of space from an order of non- 

 spatial differences, continuous yet separate, is a wonderful 

 piece of subtlety and logic. And yet he has to confess that 

 continuous diflerences form in the first instance only a logi- 

 cal series, which need not appear spatial, and that wher- 

 ever it does so appear, this must be accounted a ' fact,' due 

 merely 'to the nature of the sovil.'f 



Lipps, and almost all the an ti- sensationalist theorists 

 except Helmholtz, seem guilty of that confusion which Mr. 



*In fact, to borrow a simile from Prof. G. E. Mtlller (Theorie der siunl. 

 Aufmerksamkeit, p. 38), the various senses bear in the Helmboltzian phi- 

 losophy of perception tlie same relation to the ' object ' perceived by their 

 means that a troop of jolly drinkers bear to the landlord's bill, when no 

 one has any money, but each hopes that one of the rest will pay. 



fGrundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), pp. 480, 591-2. Psycholo- 

 gische Studien (1885), p. 14. 



