Note 161 — Chapter XX

Of the anatomical and physiological conditions of these facts we know as yet but little, and that little need not here be discussed. Two principal hypotheses have been invoked in the case of the retina. Wundt (Menschen- u. Thierseele, i. 214) called attention to the changes of color-sensibility which the retina displays as the image of the colored object passes from the fovea to the periphery. The color alters and becomes darker, and the change is more rapid in certain directions than in others. This alteration in general, however, is one of which, as such, we are wholly unconscious. We see the sky as bright blue all over, the modifications of the blue sensation being interpreted by us, not as differences in the objective color, but as distinctions in its locality. Lotze (Medizinische Psychologie, 333, 355), on the other hand, has pointed out the peculiar tendency which each particular point of the retina has to call forth that movement of the eyeball which will carry the image of the exciting object from the point in question to the fovea. With each separate tendency to movement (as with each actual movement) we may suppose a peculiar modification of sensibility to be conjoined. This modification would constitute the peculiar local tingeing of the image by each point. See also Sully's Psychology, pp. 118-121. Prof. B. Erdman has quite lately (Vierteljahrsschrift f. wiss. Phil., x. 324-9) denied the existence of all evidence for such immanent qualia of feeling characterizing each locality. Acute as his remarks are, they quite fail to convince me. On the skin the qualia are evident, I should say. Where, as on the retina, they are less so (Kries and Auerbach), this may well be a mere difficulty of discrimination not yet educated to the analysis.