(Schopenhauer: Satz vom Grunde, p.58.) This philosopher then enumerates seriatim what the Intellect does to make the originally subjective sensation objective: 1) it turns it bottom side up; 2) it reduces its doubleness to singleness; 3) it changes its flatness to solidity; and 4) it projects it to a distance from the eye.Again: " Sensations are what we call the impressions on our senses, in so far as they come to our consciousness as states of our own body, especially of our nervous apparatus; we call them perceptions when we form out of them the representation of outer objects." (Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 1870, p.101.) -- Once more:
"Sensation is always accomplished in the psychic centres, but it manifests itself at the excited part of the periphery.In other words, one is conscious of the phenomenon in the nervous centres....but one perceives it in the peripheric organs.This phenomenon depends on the experience of the sensations themselves, in which there is a reflection of the subjective phenomenon and a tendency on the part of perception to return as it were to the external cause which has roused tile mental state because the latter is connected with the former." (Sergi: Psychologie Physiologique (Paris, 1888), p.189.) -- The clearest and best passage I know is in Liebmann:
Der Objective Anblick (1869), pp.67-72, but it is unfortunately too long to quote.
This is proved by Weber's device of causing the head to be firmly pressed against a support by another person, whereupon the direction of traction ceases to be perceived.
Lotze: Med.Psych., 428-433; Lipps: Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, 582.
Injuries to Nerves (Philadelphia, 1872), p.350 ff.
In reality it probably means only a restless movement of desire, which he might make even after he had become aware of his impotence to touch the object.
Revue Philosophique, vii.p.1 ff., an admirable critical article, in the course of which M.
Janet gives a bibliography of the cases in question.See also Dunan: ibid.
xxv.165-7.They are also discussed and similarly Interpreted by T.K.
Abbot: Sight and Touch (1864), chapter x.
The intermediary and shortened locations of the lost band and foot in the amputation cases also show this.It is easy to see why the phantom foot might continue to follow the position of the artificial one.But I confess that I cannot explain its half way-positions.
It is from this confused assumption that the time-honored riddle comes, of how, with an upside-down picture on the retina, we can see things right-side up.Our consciousness is naively supposed to inhabit the picture and to feel the picture's position as related to other objects of space.But the truth is that the picture is non-existent either as a habitat or as anything else, for immediate consciousness.Our notion of it is an enormously late conception.The outer object is given immediately with all those qualities which later are named and determined in relation to other sensations.The 'bottom' of this object is where we see what by touch we afterwards know as our feet , the 'top' is the place in which we see what we know as other people's heads, etc., etc.Berkeley long ago made this matter perfectly clear (see his Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, 93-98, 113-118).
For full justification the reader must see the next chapter.He may object, against the summary account given now, that in a babe's immediate field of vision the various things which appear are located relatively to each other from the outset.I admit that if discriminated, they would appear so located.
But they are parts of the content of one sensation, not sensations separately experienced, such as the text is concerned with.The fully developed 'world,'
in which all our sensations ultimately find location, is nothing but an imaginary object framed after the pattern of the field of vision, by the addition and continuation of one sensation upon another in an orderly and systematic way.In corroboration of my text I must refer to pp.57-60 of Riehl's book quoted above on page 32, and to Uphues: Wahrnehmung und Empfiudung (1888), especially the Einleitung and pp.51-61.
