The Analysis of Matter

the tactual time of the tactual breakfast in the tactual room. It is difficult enough for the plain man—such as the present author—to accept the miracle of getting the two[Pg 145] newspapers into the two rooms daily with such admirable exactitude at the same time. But the additional miracle introduced by the two times is really incredible." This passage is so pleasant that I hate to criticize it. But I do not know how else to make clear where I differ from Dr Whitehead. There is first a purely verbal question to be cleared up. Dr Whitehead says it is an error to deduce space from the relations between figures. It is certainly an error to deduce physical space in this way, but with psychological space the matter is different. There certainly are perceived relations between figures, and these perceived relations are part of our perceptual data in physics. Whether they are to be said to constitute a space or not, is a verbal question. Psychologists, as a rule, find it convenient to say so; but the matter is unimportant. When this question has been cleared away, however, there remain others which are vital to an understanding of the relation between physics and perception. Take, first, the question of the two times. As will appear when we come to the causal theory of perception, the whole of my perceptual world is, from the standpoint of physics, in my head; any two events which I experience together overlap in physical space, and all of them together, in physical space, occupy a volume smaller than my head, since it certainly does not include the hair, skull, teeth, etc. Consequently, on relativity principles, there is no question of two times, since this only arises for events which are spatially separated in physical space. As for the necessity of distinguishing tactual and visual space: there are perceived relations between objects seen simultaneously, and also between objects touched simultaneously, and these relations are part of the crude material out of which we construct our notion of space. These relations cannot hold between a visual and a tactual percept. But there are other relations which do hold—namely, those of correlation:[Pg 146] when I see my hand in contact with a visual object I feel it in contact with a tactual object, and moreover the visual and the tactual object have certain relations to each other—e.g. where we see a corner we get a tactual sensation of sharpness. All this, however, is learnt by experience; that is to say, we learn the laws of the correlation by experience. The infant can be seen learning them. One may call these laws "pre-established harmonies," but they are no more so than any other scientific laws. Unless we are going to say that all laws of nature must be demonstrable by pure logic, which is hardly conceivable nowadays, we must admit that there are co-existences and sequences which we expect on a basis of past experience, in spite of the fact that their failure would not be logically impossible. And the correlation of visual and tactual sensations is a case of this sort. It is sometimes suggested, in such cases, that the correlated occurrences are merely different manifestations of one and the same entity. This is, in fact, the view of common sense, which holds that it can both see and touch the same object. I have no objection whatever to this way of speaking, and I do not deny that, rightly interpreted, it may express a correct view. But it remains nevertheless true that the entity said to be manifested is inferred from experience of a correlation, and that the percepts correlated are not logically interconnected, but only empirically. We have , a visual percept, and at the same time , a tactual percept. Each rouses appropriate reflexes, and, owing to their frequently occurring together, it happens in time that each rouses also the reflexes appropriate to the other. This practical induction occurs before the child has reflected that the two are correlated; indeed, unless he becomes a learned man he probably never realizes the correlation of and . But as soon as we reflect upon the matter we can see that there is no necessary correlation. It fails with blind men, and with men whose fingers have been anæsthetized.[Pg 147] In general, however, the correlation holds good. Common sense explains it by regarding both touch and sight as ways of getting to know an object which is at once tangible and visible. In the language of the causal theory of perception, we say that and have a common cause, in general external to the body. I do not wish to deny this, but only to point out that, when we are considering the grounds of our knowledge, we cannot say that we know of the correlation because we know of the common external cause. The order in knowledge is the opposite: we have evidence for the correlation in our experience, and we infer[36] the common cause from the correlation, so that the common cause cannot have more certainty than the correlation, which is its premiss. From a behaviouristic point of view, the infant "knows" the correlation when either stimulus calls out the response originally appropriate to the other. We must here guard against a small possible misunderstanding. If and are invariably correlated, it may be said, it is impossible that one should occur without the other, and therefore there can be no means of judging whether one alone would elicit the response belonging to the other. In fact, the matter is not quite so simple as we have been taking it to be. What we learn by infantile experience is not that and are always correlated; it is possible to touch in the dark, or with the eyes shut, and it is possible to see without touching. What we learn is that the correlation can be brought about easily in many cases. Movements of the eye will usually give a visual sensation corresponding to a previously uncorrelated tactual sensation, and movements of the hand (or other part of the body) will, in a certain proportion of cases, give a tactual sensation corresponding to a previously uncorrelated visual sensation. Children practising the hand-eye co-ordination attempt to grasp objects not within their reach; it is only[Pg 148] gradually that distance comes to be judged more or less correctly. When objects are not within our grasp, a new correlation comes into play—namely, between the visual sensation and the journey required to bring the object within our reach. Unfamiliar circumstances will cause even adults to make mistakes—for example, that of underestimating the depth of objects under water. Great distances remain permanently beyond the scope of common sense: only science can assure us that the sun is farther off than the moon. What we can observe the infant learning is the bodily acts which will, in fact, reinforce a percept of one sense by a percept of another; more particularly he learns to touch what he sees—i.e. to procure for himself a correlated pair , , instead of the isolated . Similarly he learns to look round when he hears a voice, and so on. All this implies that he has, so far as action is concerned, the notion of a physical object, as something capable of affecting several senses simultaneously. The element of recognition is logically separable, and arises somewhat earlier. These motor habits are essential in generating common-sense beliefs, which arise at a much later stage of mental growth. Common sense, in its more primitive form, is hardly aware that there is such an occurrence as perceiving; it is only aware of the perceived object. And by the time that even the most rudimentary reflection begins, each sense calls out responses connected with other senses, so that even when, from the standpoint of external stimulus, only one sense is affected, the experience has the massiveness of something in which several senses are involved. See, for example, the pictures in Kohler's Mentality of Apes: here we see chimpanzees which are watching others with sympathetic movements of the arms that indicate stimulation of bodily feelings connected with balance, although the sole stimulus is visual. This accounts for the fact that common sense can so confidently identify an object touched and not seen with an[Pg 149] object seen but not touched—e.g. the cricket-ball now successfully caught and the same ball as it flew through the air. The reason is that the experience is always richer than the sensory stimulus alone would warrant: it contains always responses arising from physiological experience of past correlations. If an adult were to hear a donkey's bray for the first time, without having previously known that there was an animal which made that noise, his experience would be amazingly unlike that of a normal adult in the same circumstances. Common sense does not initially distinguish as sharply as civilized nations do between persons, animals, and things. Primitive religion affords abundant evidence of this. A thing, like an animal, has a sort of power residing within it: it may fall on your head, roll over in the wind, and so on. It is only gradually that inanimate objects become sharply separated from people, through the observation that their actions have no purpose. But animals are not separable from people on this ground, and are in fact thought by savages to be much more intelligent than they are. Common sense is, in most respects, naively realistic: it believes that, as a rule, our perceptions show us objects as they really are. It is able to hold this view because of the mass of experience which, in each individual, precedes the common-sense outlook. We do not think a distant person smaller than a person near at hand; we do not judge circular objects seen sideways to be elliptic; and so on. All this is, for common sense, part of the perception; it may be doubted whether it is not so also for psychology. But it is certainly not part of the infant's initial perceptive apparatus: it is something which the infant has to learn. Some of it is learnt after the beginnings of speech have been acquired—particularly a right judgment as to the size of distant objects. But at any rate by the time a child is three years old he has acquired the common-sense outlook. That is to say, his immediate reaction[Pg 150] to a sensory stimulus involves a great deal of previous experience, and is such as to enable him to arrive, without any mental process, at a far more objective view of what he perceives than was possible at birth. I mean here by "objective" not anything metaphysical, but merely "agreeing with the testimony of others." It would be a complete mistake to suppose that, in an adult, there is first an experience corresponding to the bare sensory stimulus, and then an inference to that of which it is a sign. This may occur in certain cases, for example, if we watch a man drawing a face in an apparently haphazard manner, and do not realize till the last moment that a face is being intended. But such an experience is quite unlike normal perception, where the "inference," in the only sense in which it can be said to exist, is physiological, or at any rate not discoverable by introspection. It is because the sensory stimulus is able to lead us, without any mental intermediary, to an object practically identical with that perceived by others in our neighbourhood, that we are able to adopt the common-sense belief that we actually perceive external objects. The notion of cause is part of the apparatus of common sense. I do not think it would be true to say that common sense regards objects as the causes of our perceptions; it would not, unless challenged, think of bringing in causation in this connection. It looks for causes