The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt.

  • Watt, Henry J. (Henry Jackson), 1879-1925.
Date:
[between 1910 and 1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    we know a second dimension of pitch might be realisable in ourselves, if wo could procure the necessary physical variations required for, say, a pitch disparity of the two ears. But this sort of speculation is perhaps unprofitable. The articular sense or the so-called sense of active touch also gives us an ordinal manifold of two, if not of three, dimensions. The differences appreciable in the different relative positions of the two lirnbs that meet in a joint, it is true, are not usually described as ordinal but as qualitative. But that classification seems to me to be certainly wrong. In the present connexion this sense is of interest only be- cause its ordinal differences are not usually said to be spatial or localisational, but to be differences of position. Thus they form, in a manner, a companion to the pitch series and con- firm the need for abstracting the ordinal variation from that of localisation for the purposes of the ultimate analysis and reconstruction of sense. The study of the sensory attribute of order is, as I have variously tried to show, merely the foundation of an indefinite process of study by which the senses seem willing to be shuffled into a complete parallel with one another, and by which thereafter all the other cognitive functions seem likely to be much more intelligible than they have been hitherto. In the following pages I wish to give some account of these changes of outlook, especially towards the cognitive group. The former I have already pursued in considerable detail. But that thoroughness can be attained only for portions of the vast field in question and even then at best only in a temporarily adequate way. A sketch of portions of the field that are based on an inadequate survey can have value only as a rough guide or plan of approach. Some^ problems will doubtless withstand the effort to penetrate their obscurity, especially those of the qualitative differences of vision and still more of smell.^ The way in which the attribute of order brings the senses into conformity with one another may be illustrated by the case of hearing. The attributes are the result of the com- parative analysis of the simplest elements or particles of sensation. Having brought these into a probable general agreement we should naturally expect to find that this agree- ment will extend to the simpler complexities of sensation. In the sense in which we are most keenly expert, namely, in vision, we find prominent a group of complexities of which ^ A very interesting arrangement of smell qualities has recently been proposed by R. Henning.