Hierarchy Index Cards - J
James
James 71 (b) If someone draws a line across your wrist it will feel as though the member were moving in the opposite direction. If you put your fingertip on your forehead & move your head so that the finger describes circles on your forehead, it will feel as if your finger is moving. When you spread your fingers, the still ones will feel as though they move. These illusions are survivals of a primitive form of perception, when motion was felt as such, but ascribed to the whole ‘content’ of consciousness, & not yet distinguished as belong exclusively to one of its parts.
When our perception is fully developed we go beyond the mere relative motion of thing & ground, & can ascribe absolute motion to one of these components of our total object, & absolute rest to another. When, in vision for example, the whole field of view seems to move together, we think it is ourselves or our eyes which are moving; & any object in the foreground which may seem to move relatively to the background is judged by us to be really still. But primitively this discrimination is not perfectly made. The sensation of the motion spreads over all that we see & infects it. Any relative motion of object & retina both makes the object move, & makes us feel ourselves in motion. Even now when our whole field of view really does move we get giddy, & feel as if we too were moving; & we still see an apparent motion of the entire field of view whenever we suddenly jerk our head & eyes or shake them quickly to & fro… We know… what really happens, but the conditions are unusual, so our primitive sensation persists unchecked. So it does when clouds float across the moon. We know the moon is still; but we see it move further than the clouds.
73 Amongst animals, movement is the quality that particularly attracts attention. The peripheral parts of our retinae are sentinels: when a beam of light moves over them, they cry “Who goes there?” & call the foveae to the spot. Most parts of the skin perform the same office for the fingertips…
DEH working out his ideas. Index-Card-J-08-09: “I have it…”
Card-J-08-11. Reading James.
DH: “Flying over the Tomb of ? at Delhi I noticed how incredibly minute it seemed. It would not have seemed so small had I seen it from a hill at the same distance.”
Index Card J-08
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