in the present case any claim to pose as an explanation of the facts? Hyperexcentric projection (sensation of doubled contact) is explained by the principle that we perceive in most instances the beginning of a movement, not its course. There is a saltus here, from molecular displacement to sensation, which it requires faith to take.
Objectivity is given with sensation-content; subjectivity comes later, with apprehension of the sensation-act. Rather, it seems to me, is the separation of the two concepts the secondary thing, not the origin of one of them from the other. The baby-consciousness that Dr. Dessoir observed was probably an objective-subjective chaos, not yet objective and subjective, and certainly not purely objective. Quite right is the emphasizing of the objective nature of the common sensations.[1]
The introduction concludes with a chapter on the classification of perceptions. Dr. Dessoir rejects the 'time-sense,' not without reason. The static sense goes altogether without mention, unless one count the 'rapidity sense' as a sub-heading of it. In the writer's classification two principles cross one another, — those of nervous correlation and of localization. He speaks of total, organic, irradiatory, central, and summation sensations. The special sections on the sense of pressure (in the course of which Dr. Dessoir proposes the word Haptics to cover all cutaneous sensibility with the exception of temperature-sensations) and the experiments upon temperature, I hope to notice in connection with the concluding parts of the research, as soon as these appear. If the author can furnish, even in rough, a psychology of the skin, he will have done good service. The chapters with which I have dealt here are of a preliminary character. There is much in them that stimulates to criticism: on the other hand they are throughout clearly and suggestively written.
London and New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1892. — pp. viii, 279.}}
This book has the inevitable demerits, as well as most of the possible merits, of a logical treatise. It is an abstract and formal discussion of principles, with constant tantalizing suggestions of rich concrete interest; it circles round controversies the most vital with an air of judicial unconcern, and anon descends to the commonplace and even at times to the trivial. Yet it is the kind of book calculated to redeem logic from the charge of being a barren and altogether abstract science. For
- ↑ Why will not the author be consistent, and call these sensations "Gemein-empfindungen"? Even when he describes them under the head of "total perceptions" he admits the element of feeling (p. 237).
