The psychology of sound / by Henry J. Watt.

  • Henry J. Watt
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The psychology of sound / by Henry J. Watt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    its variability is chiefly intensive and hardly ordinal at all. In fact we are explicitly aware of muscular sensations as such only when they are considerably intensive and begin to give some awareness of strain or resistance. Intensity may therefore at once be conceded, while we may see ordinal variation behind whatever awareness of localisation of muscular sensation we possess, and extensity in their common varia¬ tions of bulk or mass, as we pass from large muscles to small muscles. These variations in bulk doubtless imply the presence of sets of ordinal differences in the mass sensation we obtain from each muscle; and it is probable that varying numbers of the fibres of one and the same muscle are innervated in response to the varying strain or volitions directed upon the muscle. A variation in the extent of muscular sensation from one and the same muscle would thus be evoked. It is not necessary to suppose, as Myers (85) suggests, that the intensity of muscular sensation varies with these extents; these intensities are surely more likely to be dependent upon the strain put upon the fibre in which the receptor for muscular sensation is embedded. But our cognition of strain may take both variations of intensity and of extent from one and the same muscle into account. In organic sensations, amongst which hunger, thirst, repletion, nausea, and many others are included, we find a general obscurity of attributes, but no other serious obstacle to their identification. Their qualities are all rather vague and difficult to distinguish from pressure or mixtures of pressure and pain. Their localisation, although by no means precise, is certainly clear enough to warrant the assumption of underlying orders, and they always occur in considerable bulk. We therefore feel entitled to claim that the formula of the attributes derived from the first group, holds also for the second. The special psychological interest of this group of sensations lies in the frequent obscurity and variability of their attributes. But, as we have already suggested, this may properly be ascribed to a want of variation in the physiological correlatives of these attributes, and not to any psychical incapacity of the sensations themselves. If the stimulus to one of these senses is present, it may be sufficiently effective with only one line of variation. Hunger and thirst need not wander over the body; their intensity is enough for all purposes. And their physiological validity is further secured by their mass or bulk, dependent as that is upon the distribution of their receptors over the surface or over a representative section of the organ most immediately concerned in the related function. So we apparently never get a ‘spot7 of articular
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