A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    85/446 page 67
    ment of my limbs, or eyes, or body. The elementary con¬ sciousness of extensity or bigness is fused with our visual consciousness of color and colorless light and with our tactual consciousness of pressure. That is to say, we are conscious both of colors and of pressures as extended.2 The conscious¬ ness of this blue or of this heavy object as more or less extended is, however, an indefinitely less complex experience than that which we call the consciousness of space. Such a conscious¬ ness of ‘mere extensity’ —a constituent, we may suppose, of the experience of the new-born child when his retina or hand is stimulated — is not a consciousness of precise size, of definite form, or of exact position; it is not even a conscious¬ ness of surface or of depth; it is a vague, unrelated, elemental consciousness, to be compared, perhaps, with such spatial consciousness as a grown person has when opening his eyes in a dark room. Yet the elemental consciousness of extensity is the centre and core of the complex experiences of spatial form and position. b. The Consciousness of Distance, or Apartness The simplest form of my complex spatial consciousness is the experience, visual and tactual, of apartness or distance.3 I see, for example, that my ink-bottle stands apart from my paper-weight; and I am conscious, with closed eyes, that the collar and the cuff which chafe me are apart from each other. Some psychologists have regarded the experience of apartness as an elemental consciousness incapable of further analysis, but careful introspection will disclose that it is made up of a consciousness of the two-ness, or duality (of sense objects or qualities) fused with a consciousness of intervening exten¬ sity. Thus, when I perceive that a red dot lies apart from
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