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  • On Hume on Space:Green's Attack, James' Empirical Response
  • Alexander Klein (bio)

What part of our spatial perceptions comes directly from sensation, and what part is contributed by the mind itself?1 This question proved a thorn in traditional empiricism's side. The difficulty stems from two of empiricism's core commitments. First, canonical empiricists like Berkeley and Hume maintained that perceptions are composed of sensory atoms. Second, they also held that the [End Page 415] distinction between reality and fantasy matches the distinction between what the mind receives from sensation and what it creates in thought. This combination produces a problem concerning perceived spatial relations. If our perceptions are fundamentally atomic, then spatial relations between those atoms must be constructed by the mind. But by empiricists' own lights, this would make spatial relations (like being to the left or right of, above or below, etc.) nothing but mental fictions—an embarrassment, especially given the robust role of observable spatial properties in many scientific theories.

Thomas Hill Green, a founder of British idealism, relied on the above argument as a centerpiece in his highly influential and highly critical introduction to Hume's Treatise (1874). Green wanted to attack the very idea that the mind is a suitable object for scientific study. Since associationist psychologists of the late nineteenth century had premised their research on a fundamentally Humean conception of the mind,2 Green sought to undermine the very idea of empirical psychology by attacking Hume.

I have two aims in this essay. One is to come to grips with Hume's view of spatial relations. There have been several recent attempts to defend Hume from attacks of the sort Green pioneered. I shall argue that Green exposed potentially serious problems in Hume's view that these more recent readings have yet to overcome.

My second aim is to show that, in his early work, William James provided a compelling response to Green. James designed a "revised empiricism"3 that accounted for the facts of spatial perception without succumbing to the aforementioned problems with Hume's theory. But James found he had to give up several of Hume's basic assumptions, including the assumption that perceptual experience is fundamentally composed of psychological atoms. The claim that there are no psychological atoms is interesting because James supported it with experimental data rather than with introspective description or a priori argument.

Instead of portraying raw sensation as a collection of atoms, James portrayed sensation as a continuous stream. He then used his new model of sensation to provide an account of spatial perception. The sensory stream contained a native, vague quale of extension, he argued; but subjects must learn to identify distinct positions and spatial relations inside that stream. They do this by selectively attending to portions of the perceptual field that are interesting or important. Thus on James' model, a subject cannot come to perceive positions or spatial relations until she takes an interest in certain objects in her (perceived) environment. But his model nevertheless supports real ideas of space because, when the mind actively attends to positions and relations, it only subtracts or ignores extraneous sensory data. Unlike for traditional empiricists, the active mind does not amplify or otherwise distort raw sensation, according to James. [End Page 416]

The story of Hume, Green, and James illustrates how porous the boundary was between philosophy and the young science of psychology. What is remarkable is that a treatise in the history of philosophy—Green's "Introduction" to Hume—should have provided a stimulus to scientific innovation. It was partly in response to Green's "Introduction," I argue, that James searched for empirical data that would support a new, post-Humean model of sensation, a model that could set the immature science of psychology on secure footing.

In section 1, I will investigate Hume's theory of spatial perception and Green's subsequent attack. In section 2, I will examine James' response.

1. Green

1.1 A Struggle Over Psychology

In the 1870s and 80s, a lively debate emerged over the idea that the mind is the sort of thing that can be studied scientifically. On one side were neo-Kantians and -Hegelians...

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