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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    favour of a similar process, although the product here is not by any means so obvious. But it seems clear, that space cannot be set down as an original or inherent feature of any one sense. The case of pitch-hearing compels us to admit as inherent in any sense only an ordinal field or system and to reserve space for a stage beyond even that of stereoscopy. In that further stage the different senses become correlated to one another. This probably happens in virtue of the similar forms and motions that appear in the different senses and their conjoint variations and displacements (a very com- plicated matter, of course). But the case of stereoscopic vision again warns us that we must not set this down as the result of cognitive correlation, i.e., as a correlation through the medium of the identity or similarity of the conceptual schemes or ordinal systems that we bring forth from our intellect and attach to the presentations of the various senses, as far as they will fit them. We have no right thus to pre- suppose a conceptual intellect hovering over the turbulent chaos of sense and weaving it into a hierarchy of orders. It is out of the question that the intellect could create any typical synthesis of sense. This must in each case first appear, if the intellect (when it appears) is to set to work upon the former and to support and to enlarge it. However much evidence of conceptual correlation there may be in our advanced studies of the world of space, we can hardly doubt that space is a specially distinguished and unified system of orders to which all the relative ordinal dimensions of all the senses are attached. The pitch dimension of sound alone stands outside the spatial system. But this one exception is brilliantly instruc- tive. For it shows that the spatial system is so clear and distinct, and that all the senses are so vividly attached to it that we have previously entirely failed to grasp the variations of tonal pitch as an ordinal digression excluded from it and irrelevant to it. Even when the true character of pitch has been in some manner encountered, the first and prevailing inclination of most analysts has been to describe it as “ quasi- spatial ”. On the other hand the systems of the senses, especially of vision, are so closely attached to a spatial system that each of them has often been thought to be equally and similarly spatial in its own degree of complexity. It has required a special motive like that of the exceptional nature of the tonal dimension to force us to abstract from stereoscopy the notion of spatiality and to recognise the binocular stereo- scopic field as a merely tri-dimensional ordinal system, in which we encounter/orms not spaces. In looking into this