From Association to Gestalt: The Fate of Hermann Lotze's Theory of Spatial Perception, 18461920 Author(s): William R.

Woodward Source: Isis, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec., 1978), pp. 572-582 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/231093 . Accessed: 14/02/2014 17:04
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From
of

Association Lermann Lotze's

to

Gestalt: Theory 18461920

of

The

Fate Spatial

Perception,

By William R. Woodward* MAJOR PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETER of Kant and critic of Herbart and Hegel, Hermann Lotze ( 1817-188 1) is known to historians of psychology primarily for his theory of spatial perception.' As Professor of Philosophy at Gottingen University from 1845 to 1880, he published his theory of the physiological mechanism for spatial consciousness no less than six times.2 Standard accounts present his local sign theory as an associationistic, empiricistic, or empiristic view.3 Yet they also mention its influence among nativists such as Lotze's own student Carl Stumpf. Certainly there is an historical irony here which deserves explanation. This paper will describe Lotze's theory, indicate its origins in the work of scientists such as E. H. Weber and Johannes Muillerand philosophers such as Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart, and trace its transformation at the hands of psychologists of various theoretical persuasions.4 The intent is not to argue for Lotze's personal influence so much as to illustrate how one fertile idea in the history of science can serve as the catalyst for a much broader conceptual development. Some terminological clarification is necessary at the outset. Empiricism refers to the theory that knowledge comes from experience, and that its discrete "elements"or "simple ideas" are organized into "compounds" or "complex ideas" according to certain basic laws of association. Nativism is applied to those theories which allot experience a subordinate role in the origin of knowledge.5 We are concerned here not with the origin of knowledge per se but with the genesis of our spatial knowledge of altitude, azimuth, and depth. The principal cues of depth perception were commonly accepted in the nineteenth century to be accommodation, convergence, and binocular parallax.6 However, theoretical differences among so-called empirists7 and nativists
Received November 1976; revised/accepted October 1977. *Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824. An earlier version was read at Cheiron, the International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences at Washington, D.C., in May 1976. I am grateful to C. Gillispie, M. Henle, R. High, D. Leary, 0. Marx, N. Pastore, R. Richards, K. Rothschuh, M. Schmidt, and the anonymous reviewers for Isis for their valuable critical comments. IJ. T. Merz, "Rudolph Hermann Lotze," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. XV, pp. 12-15. 21n the years 1846, 1852, 1856, 1872, 1877, 1879. See references in notes 9, 10, and 13 below. 3T. Ribot, German Psychology of Today, trans. J. M. Baldwin (New York: Scribner's, 1886), pp. 96-133; E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (2nd ed.; New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1950); R. I. Watson, The Great Psychologists (3rd ed.; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), p. 231. 4 Earlier accounts which support my interpretation are 0. Klemm, A Historv of Psychology, trans. E. C. Wilm and R. Pintner (New York: Scribner's 1914), pp. 340-345; M. Dessoir, Outlines of the History of Psychology, trans. D. Fisher (New York: Macmillan, 1912), pp. 245-247. 5G. E. Moore, "Nativism and Empiricism (in Epistemology)," in J. M. Baldwin, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1901), Vol. I, pp. 129-132. 6The standard source is N. Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception: 1650-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 71 take the noun "empirism" and its adjective "empiristic"from The Compact Edition of the Oxford
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fueled controversies which burned well into this century. The underlying debate over fundamentals focused on our knowledge of two dimensions: is extension, and hence depth perception, based on a passive association of sensations or on an active organization in perception? Historically, six positions can be distinguished along the continuum from radical empirism to nativism:8 Position I: association between qualitative sensations alone; for example, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Wilhelm Fridolin Volkmann, and Theodor Lipps. Position II: association between qualitative sensations and feelings of movement; for example, Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt. Position III: association between qualitative sensations, physiological movements, and the feelings of those movements as conditions for a mental "reconstruction"; for example, Ernst Heinrich Weber, Johann Czermak, Georg Meissner, Hermann Lotze, James Sully, George Trumbull Ladd, and Harald Hdffding. Position IV: no association because all three dimensions are given by physiological mechanisms; for example, Johannes Mtuller, Ewald Hering, and Karl Vierordt. Position V: no initial association because "extensity" and "volume" are given in sensation itself, although association may be involved in subsequent judgment of extension and depth; for example, Carl Stumpf, William James, Alois H14fler, and Ernst Mach. Position VI: no association at all because extension and depth are an immediate perception (Gestalt); for example, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler. I will demonstrate that Lotze's account (III) was specifically referred to by proponents of the first five positions and that the last position (VI) is a conceptual outgrowth of the preceding ones. His theory gained acceptance because it brought together physiological and philosophical explanation to account for a psychological phenomenon. Its immediate influence was to gain entry for sensory physiology into an epistemological and optical problem. Its long-range legacy was to contribute to psychology as the study of consciousness, a revolutionary conception allied with the phenomenology which was heralded by Stumpf, James, and the Gestalt psychologists.
LOTZE'S LOCAL SIGN THEORY AND ITS ORIGINS

Lotze's theory involved both a physical and a psychological component, and it was separately formulated for the two major spatial senses, vision and touch. The physical component in vision consisted of certain reflexive oculo-motor tendencies (Bewegungstriebe) which automatically orient any peripheral stimulation onto the center of the retina, that is, onto the fovea centralis. The psychological component
English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), Vol. I, p. 855, and from H. G. Beigel, der Psychologie / Dictionary of Psychology (New York: Unger, 1971), p. 80, where empirisch Wo3rterbuch is "empirical" and empiristisch is "empiristic . . . empiristic theory of optical space perception." The distinction was pointed out to me by Professor Pastore, who recently wrote that "in our discussion, 'empirist' will designate a theorist who believes that, as it were, 'we learn to see.' 'Empiricist'may have this meaning but also, in its philosophical meaning, it refers to a theorist who holds that all knowledge is derived through the senses. Boring's use of 'empiricist' covers both meanings." See N. Pastore, "Reevaluation of Boring on Kantian Influence, Nineteenth Century Nativism, Gestalt Psychology and Helmholtz," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1974, 10:376. 8Positions I, II, III, and V are derived from C. Stumpf, Uber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1873), pp. 7, 160. Perhaps the basic bone of contention was the term "association" itself. The empiristic theories relied heavily on the so-called laws of association, since their Newtonian atomistic account of the mind was essentially a passive one. The nativistic theories, with their active construal of the mind, were more likely to use the term "reconstruction."

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was the "feeling of movement" involved in this orientation, and it comprised intersecting continua which came through practice to signify extension. The motor tendency and the feeling which accompanied it taken together were what Lotze called the local sign (Lokalzeichen). Thus, we "learn to see," yet paradoxically we already know how to see by virtue of the reflex movements and their subjective feelings in consciousness. 9 In the case of touch, the theory was somewhat different on account of the nature of the available sense organs. The physiological component became the nerves that sense heat, pressure, and pain, while the psychological component was the "sensory circles" which they innervate. These circles were overlapping rather than separate, and extension depended upon the fineness of innervation in a given area of the skinfor example, the fingertip can discriminate more accurately than the back of the hand. Cutaneous space, or extension on the skin, was therefore perceived by means of local signs, or the feelings of distance (not necessarily movement) between sensory circles. Lotze's general formulation for the perception of visual and cutaneous surfaces postulated a system of nervous excitations, a and b, accompanied by sensations, a and 13, which are joined by a new nervous event c, and a new sensation 7 signaling their location in relation to one another.'0 His definition of the local sign, c and Y, was based on the assumption of an occasionalistic theory of mind. In other words, bodily movements are the "occasion for" mental changes, although their nature and their laws are altogether different.'1
9H. Lotze, Microcosmus, trans. E. Hamilton and E. E. C. Jones, 3 vols. in 1 (4th ed.; New York: Scribner's, 1897 [earlier eds. 1856, 1858, 1864]), Vol. I, pp. 229-232. E.g., Lotze repeated this distinction in his final reply to his critics in 1879. The simplest view, he wrote, would be that the local sign is a physical impression of a quantitative nature which is spatially juxtaposed to the mental impression of a sensory quality-i.e., classical associationism. However, this would require a "double conduction" of two impressions along the same nerve fiber. The other assumption seems more natural, namely, that a single total state, e.g., a tone, arises from the main sensation and an auxiliary feeling (the local sign). In the course of time, this tone is compared with other ones, "and it may be that the comparison of these cases would arouse an activity of separation which would analyse the total impressions into their component parts, but which would at the same time learn to refer the local sign, thus separated, in each case to that qualitative impression from which it was parted in thought and in thought alone." Metaphysic, trans. B. Bosanquet et al., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), Vol. II, pp. 256-258. Simultaneity and succession, similarity and contrast, were involved, yet they followed rather than led to the original sensation. Positions IV, V, and VI emphasized this aspect of Lotze's Position III. Cf. H. Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852), pp. 325-452. '0Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, pp. 332-333. In 1872, Lotze was induced by his student Stumpf to write a letter of clarification to accompany the latter's Habilitationsschrift. Now he employed an expanded terminology, which I have altered slightly to make it consistent with the earlier one: the physical stimuli (A, B, and C), the retinal or cutaneous points they strike (a, b, and c), the attached ocular-motor muscles or cutaneous structures (m, p, and r), the sensory qualities produced (a , /3, and Y ), and the auxiliary feelings of movement or irradiation ( ,, 7r, and X ). E.g., if A and B were to stand for red and green point sources of light, then a wr and 3 7r would stand for their sensations if they fell on different locations. Lotze anticipated disagreement over the meaning of wrand X, which he thought Stumpf would explain in terms of a physiological pattern of stimulation on the retina, but which he would interpret in terms of the auxiliary system of muscles (m, p, and r) and the feelings of their movements ( iA, r, and X ). Lotze thus made location a function of an association between the qualitative sensation and the local sign, while Stumpf considered both components "immediately given to consciousness" by local signs which are "mere physical processes." H. Lotze, "Anhang," in Stumpf, Raumvorstellung, pp. 315-324. Although they disagreed in their positions (III and V), the fact remains that Stumpf found confirmation of his own psychological nativism in two passages from Lotze's original formulation in 1846 and 1852. Ibid., p. 90. "Note that Lotze did in fact assume the phenomenal existence of the soul, or consciousness, and its physical substrate; hence they were unproblematic for his scientific psychology. His hypothetical mechanism was dualistic, even though elsewhere he would argue for a monistic metaphysics in which "soul" and "body" were different phenomenal aspects of the truly real substance. The problem was that others confused the hypothetical nature of science with the speculative nature of metaphysics. His theory of localization was meant to be an alternative to the naive idealist explanation that consciousness provides

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To better understand the theory, it will be helpful to briefly indicate its philosophical and scientific origins. Lotze's theory of mind derived from his study of Leibniz and Herbart; it was represented by M. W. Drobisch and opposed by G. T. Fechner in Lotze's circle of mentors at Leipzig, where he was a student and Docent in both philosophy and medicine from 1834 to 1843.12 He was a critical disciple, though, and he assumed Johann Friedrich Herbart's chair in Gottingen in 1844 on the reputation of his own synthesis of the Herbartian and Hegelian viewpoints in philosophy. In 1846, Lotze borrowed from Herbart's specific proposal that when we move our eyes or hands around an object in space, we pass through various series of nonspatial "presentations" and their corresponding "muscular feelings."13Although Herbart had contended that these series "fuse" to yield our perception of extent, Lotze objected that he could see no necessity that this was the case. If sensations alone were insufficient to provide location, so too were nerves. In 1846, guided by an article on nerve physiology by his teacher Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann and the book on nervous diseases by the Berlin clinician Moritz Heinrich Romburg, he noted first the anatomical basis for localization. 14According to the law of isolated conduction, neural fibers offer definite paths for the propagation of impulses to the brain. This was underpinned by the Bell-Magendie law that dorsal roots of the spinal cord convey sensation, and ventral roots convey movement. 15Yet Lotze argued against the predominant view of physiologists that the properties of nerves alone were an adequate scientific explanation. Conscious experience of space is the fact to be explained, and this problem was at least correctly stated by the law of eccentric appearance. Location is perceived to be external, or "eccentric," but as Lotze pointed out, we need to specify hypothetical mechanisms to refer a sensation to the peripheral end of the sensory fiber in touch, and to a location in space in the case of vision, audition, and olfaction. Lotze found the physiological mechanisms he needed to provide location on the retina and skin in the work of two mentors. The letters from Lotze to a disciple of Jakob Friedrich Fries reveal that he was familiar with Fries' treatise "The Optical Midpoint of the Human Eye, together with General Remarks on a Theory of Vision" (1839). 16 This treatise, in conjunction with his knowledge of Marshall Hall's work on the reflexes,17 suggested to Lotze the idea of a reflex mechanism of oculo-motor movements (or tendencies to movement) which would establish the coordinates of any stimulated point on the retina. In the absence of a reference point on the skin
extension in perception, or the naYverealist explanation that physical mechanisms alone do so. In fact, it asserted neither one nor the other, though it provisionally assumed both! Cf. H. Hoffding, A History of Modern Philosophy, trans. B. E. Meyer (London: Macmillan, 1900), pp. 520-524. 12W.R. Woodward, "The Medical Realism of R. Hermann Lotze," Dissertation (Yale University, 1975), University Microfilms 1976, No. 76-14, 576. 13 H. Lotze, "Seele und Seelenleben," reprinted in Kleine Schriften von Hermann Lotze, ed. D. Peipers, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885-1891), Vol. II, pp. 57-59. Cf. original in Handw8rterbuch der Physiologie, ed. R. Wagner, 5 vols. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1842-1853), Vol. III (1846), pp. 142-264. Lotze cited J. F. Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 2 vols. (K6nigsberg: Unzer, 1825), Vol. II, Ch. 3; reprinted in Herbart's Samtliche Werke, ed. K. Kehrbach and 0. Fliigel, 19 vols. (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964), Vol. VI, pp. 86-112. 14A. W. Volkmann, "Nervenphysiologie," in Handworterbuch der Physiologie, Vol. 11 (1844), p. 573; M. H. Romburg, Lehrbuch der Nervenkrankheiten des Menschen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Duncker, 1846), Vol. I, pp. 4 f. Cf. Lotze, "Seele," pp. 50-57. 15Cf. P. Cranefield, The Way In and the Way Out: Fran2ois Magendie, Charles Bell, and the Roots of the Spinal Nerves (Mt. Kisco, N.Y.: Futura, 1974). 16H. Lotze, "21 Briefe von Hermann Lotze an Ernst Friedrich Apelt (1835-1841)," ed. W. Gresky, Blatter fur deutsche Philosophie, 1937, 10:329-33 1. I7M. Hall, Von den Krankheiten des Nervensystems, trans. J. Wallach (Leipzig: Wigand, 1842), cited in Lotze, "Briefe," Bla't.f deut. Phil., 1938, 11:188.

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such as the fovea provided, he followed his teacher Ernst Heinrich Weber in suggesting that extension is a function of the number of sensory circles between points of excitation.'8 However, he emphasized that there is no one-to-one correspondence of sensory circles with extension since the nervous fibers overlap and so does our perception of them. Lotze thus put forward a convincing solution to a scientific problem by virtue of his philosophical expertise in theory construction. He was well aware of the philosophical insight regarding spatial perception, which was an outgrowth of Kant's transcendental aesthetic in 1781: any account of perception presupposes a priori "forms of intuition" which organize the "sensible manifold" into the "unity of 9 Lotze's innovation was to specify (1) the physiological mechanisms consciousness."' underlying the "forms of intuition" while maintaining (2) the eccentric appearance of spatial location in the "unity of consciousness." In addition, he was certainly aware of the prevailing theory of depth perception of Johannes Mtiller: the retinas are spherical and register impressions in exact correspondence with the external order.20His reform here was to assert that (3) sensory qualities are not necessarily conducted by isolated nerves, and (4) their translation in perception into the same relative position as the object requires oculo-motor movements of the retina and patterns of innervation on the skin. The latter received the designation "local signs" in his Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele in 1852.
THE EMPIRISTIC RECEPTION OF THE THEORY

The specific theoretical proposals of Lotze vis-a-vis Fries, Muller, and Herbart were almost immediately taken up by experimental investigators of the cutaneous and visual senses. In 1853, Georg Meissner, a student of the anatomist Rudolph Wagner at Gottingen, adopted Lotze's recommendation of a relative "sensory circle" in place of Weber's absolute one.21 In other words, the fineness of localization on the skin would be determined by the relative number of sensitive points or touch corpuscles excited by the "scatter circle" of stimuli rather than by a one-to-one correspondence of discriminable sensory circles and nervous fibers. Then in 1855 Jan Purkynje's student Johann Czermak tried to reconcile the Weber and the Lotze-Meissner theories.22 Czermak reinstated Weber's view of a fixed anatomical substrate by applying Lotze's term Lokalzeichen to the sensitive points (Meissner corpuscles) of any given skin area. Yet he retained the Lotze-Meissner concept of relative sensory circles by designating three variable factors in their discrimination: (1) the skin area of the sensory circle, (2) the physical scatter circle of the stimuli, and (3) the practice and attention of the observer. Two classical experimental issues in vision also received attention from the same investigators under the inspiration of Lotze's theoretical hints. In 1854 Meissner addressed the description and explanation of the "visual horopter."23 The horopter is
18E. H. Weber, "Der Tastsinn und das Gemeingefuhl," Handworterbuch der Physiologie, Vol. III, Pt. 2 (1846), pp. 524 if. Cf. Lotze, Medizinische Psychologie, p. 401 if. 19Cf. H. Lotze, Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Kant (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1882), pp. 11-31. 20J. Muller, Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Sehorgans (Leipzig: Cnobloch, 1826); Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 2 vols. (Coblenz: Ho1scher, 1834-1842). 21G. Meissner, Beitrdge zur Anatomie und Physiologie der Haut (Leipzig: Voss, 1853), pp. 44-45. 22J. Czermak, "Physiologische Untersuchungen, 2. Abth.," Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie, Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Klasse, Vienna, 1855, 15:504-512. 23G. Meissner, Beitrdge zur Physiologie des Sehorgans (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1854), pp. 61, 97; reviewed by Lotze, Gottingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 1854:1475.

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the locus of points seen single when the eyes are fixated on a given point in space. Previous investigators had described it as spherical, but Meissner's empirical work showed it to be a bowed line. His explanation was that the eye is not spherical as had been hitherto assumed. He adopted Lotze's term "local sign," and he stated that movements were required for the spatial perception. In 1855 Czermak attacked the other classical problem of "upright vision" by ridiculing the conventional view of the physiologist Adolf Fick that the spatial order in the mind was simply opposite that in the retina.24Following Lotze, he proposed that upright vision is due to the connection of lower sensitive points on the retina with motor fibers and muscular feelings representing the upper portion of the visual field, and vice versa. By comparison, the sensory fibers of the tactile senses stand in direct relation to the motor fibers of movement. It was Wilhelm Wundt who first recognized the significance of Lotze's theory in bridging the physiological and philosophical traditions. His Beitrdge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung, which appeared serially beginning in 1858, was based in large part on the work of Lotze, Meissner, and Czermak on cutaneous localization, the visual horopter, upright vision, and depth perception.25He noted that the physiologists Meissner and Czermak had shifted the import of Lotze's cutaneous local sign toward Weber's notion of a fixed anatomical substrate-that is, the number of sensory circles between two stimulated points would determine spatial extent. According to Wundt, Lotze conceived the local sign as a system of movements rather than as the feelings of those movements. Wundt reinterpreted Lotze's theory in terms of associations of sensory qualities, feelings of muscular movement, and their perfection by practice. His genetic theory (Position II) was in fact distinguished by its psychophysical parallelism, which assumed a physiological correlate for these psychological "elements." Lotze's theory (Position III) was based on occasionalism, which emphasized that physiological events are quite different though lawfully connected to the phenomenal unity of consciousness. It is important to notice that spatial perception in the German tradition was not based on the association of movements of the limbs with visual qualities; this was the British empiricist view and it was obsolete in the nineteenth century. Perception of tactile and visual space rested on independent mechanisms; the former received more attention in the 1850s, while the latter were taken up by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering in the 1860s. For example, Helmholtz adopted Lotze's term first in his essay "Ueber den Horopter" in 1864,26then in the third volume of his Handbuch der physiologischen Optik in 1866.27 In the hybrid field of physiological optics, the justification for the term "local sign" was that the eye is not a camera obscura. The discrepancy between the geometrical loci of each image and other dimensional data such as ocular movements required a message or sign to record it. The sensory quale, the ocular feeling, and the local sign were connected by an "unconscious inference." A subtle shift had occurred in the theories of Wundt and Helmholtz, though. Instead of the summation of retinal movements and their reconstruction in the soul as Lotze
17:572-574. 1862); originally published in Zeitschriftfiir rationelle Medizin, N.F., 1858-1861, 4 ff.; 17-26, 53-65, 92-104. 26H. Helmholtz, "Ueber den Horopter," Archivfiur Ophthalmologie, 1864, 10:10-11. 27 H. Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 3 vols. (2nd ed.; Hamburg/ Leipzig: Voss, 1896), Vol. III, pp. 670, 947. Cf. Helmholtz's Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. J. P. C. Southall, trans. from 3rd ed. (1910), 3 vols. (Rochester, N.Y.: Optical Society of America, 1924-1925), Vol. III, pp. 155, 185, 229-230, 533.
24J. Czermak, "Physiologische Untersuchungen, 3. Abth.," Sitzungsb. kais. Akad., 1855, 25 W. Wundt, Beitrdge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung (Leipzig/ Heidelberg: Winter,

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proposed, the association of psychological components alone was important in Position II. Psychophysical parallelism had replaced occasionalism as the underlying mind-body relation.28
THE NATIVISTIC RECEPTION OF THE THEORY

This empiristic view did not go unchallenged. During 1861 to 1864, Ewald Hering published five monographs on "the retinal sense of location."29 Hering's imaginary Cyclopean eye, consisting of monocular or binocular images fused in the principal direction of sight (Blickrichtung), still relied on ocular movements to bring the images to focus on a fixated point. His departure from Helmholtz was the assertion that these muscular movements are inborn rather than acquired. Spatial "local signs" are built into the visual system itself. Hering acknowledged Lotze for the term, then replaced it with the tripartite mechanism of altitude, azimuth, and depth "values." Thus Hering, like Helmholtz, modified the concept of Lokalzeichen to suit his own theory (Position IV). He referred to his opponents as upholding a projection theory, since for them objects were projected into space along lines of vision (Visierlinien, Gesichtslinien) rather than immediately fused by retinal mechanisms. It remained to Carl Stumpf, a student of Franz Brentano and Lotze, to place nativism on a psychological basis (Position V). Stumpf rejected the empiristic interpretation of the local sign advocated ambivalently by Lotze and wholeheartedly by Wundt and Helmholtz. His proto-phenomenological view was that qualities and spatial attributes are "immediately given" in presentations ( Vorstellungen);for example, "the color is extended," and "the extension is colored."30In his book Ueber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung in 1873, he rejected the elementistic connotation of sensation (Empfindung) and the composite one of perception (Wahrnehmung). Underlying his theory of perception was the logical criticism of the empiricist theory of judgment that the connection of subject and predicate does not involve two different material contents. It is an assertion of identity and therefore of one material content, despite the formal duality. His teacher Franz Brentano termed this "intentional inexistence" or "referenceto an object."'31 For Stumpf, therefore, the local sign was merely the physiological movements aroused by the stimulus to the retina or skin. He argued that we lack introspective evidence of the local sign as a "psychic stimulus" in the sense of Positions I, II, and III. He endorsed the Position IV of Hering that local signs are physiological rather than psychological. However, he went further than Hering when he claimed that both surface and depth are "placed into" (hineingelegt) the original presentation.
LATER VERSIONS OF THE THEORY

My aim in conclusion is to show the continuum of the six positions, or theories of

28 Robert Richards has called my attention to the fact that Merz terms Lotze a parallelist. The distinction between occasionalism and psychophysical parallelism is a fine one but I think worthwhile in that it calls attention to the slight but important shift of emphasis in psychological explanation from physical factors as necessary conditions to mental factors as sufficient ones. 29E. Hering. Beitrdge zur Physiologie, 5 monographs (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1861-1864), pp. 33-34, 290-291, 320-325. 30Stumpf, Raumvorstellung, pp. 113, 176-182. Cf. H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 63. 31Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, p. 40. Cf. J. J. Sullivan, "Franz Brentano and the Problems of Intentionality," in Historical Roots of Contemporary Psychology, ed. B. B. Wolman (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 255-256.

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spatial perception, which entered the textbooks from about 1870 to 1920. Generally speaking, they represent a trend from empirism toward nativism, although Position VI holds that the empirism-nativism distinction is a pseudo-issue. Representative of Position I was Wilhelm Fridolin Volkmann's Lehrbuch der Psychologie, which went through four editions from 1856 to 1895.32 Along with others in the Herbartian tradition such as Theodor Waitz and Carl Sebastian Cornelius, Volkmann accepted the Lokalzeichen concept as "a possession of the soul acquired through experience" rather than as "an original characteristic of the organ" of vision or touch. Another man who accepted the radical empiristic reading of local signs was Theodor Lipps. In his Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens in 1883, he applied the concept to the qualitative relations among purely intensive magnitudes: "to speak of the local sign of a single impression makes no sense fundamentally.... ; space is a system of relations."33By relations, he meant associations between series of tactual or visual presentations. To account for the "situational feelings" (Lagegefiihle) of location, he invoked the Herbartian concepts of "fusion" of presentations from identical points on the two retinas and "complication" into a spatial order. We have already mentioned the theories of Wundt and Helmholtz as representative of Position II. While Helmholtz did not modify his interpretation, Wundt developed his throughout the six editions of his Grundztige der physiologischen Psychologie from 1874 to 1910.34From the Herbartians, he adopted the concepts of "fusion"and "complication," and from Lotze the physiological mechanisms of oculo-motor tendencies and patterns of irradiation underlying his psychological local signs of vision and touch. His revised theory of "sensation-complexes" applied the term "local sign" to the fusion of an "intensive" series of retinal or tactual sensations with an "extensive" series of "tension-sensations" of movement or intended movement. Because Helmholtz made the two series independent and allowed their elements an arbitrary arrangement on the body, Wundt referred to Helmholtz's interpretation as "the double local sign hypothesis." Among those who followed Lotze most faithfully in Position III were James Sully in England, George Trumbull Ladd in the United States, and Harald Hoffding in Denmark. They differed from Wundt chiefly in their emphasis on mind as the active component, as in Sully's assertion that "all psychical changes are modifications of a conscious subject."35Similarly, Ladd followed Wundt in his discussion of two series of "sensation-complexes" in touch and vision, but he emphasized that location is the result of an associationistic synthesis "by a psychical subject, Mind."36 Finally, Hoffding noted that neither the skin nor the retina offers adequate bases for the continuity of spatial perception.37He defended Lotze's theory against some technical criticisms by his own Swedish student Reinhold Geijer on the twin assumptions of a physiological substrate and a Kantian form of apprehension of space. He explained
32W. F. Volkmann, Lehrbuch der Psychologie vom Standpunkte des Realismus, ed. C. S. Cornelius, 2 vols. (4th ed.; Cothen: Schulze, 1894-1895), Vol. II, p. 54. 33T. Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (Bonn: Cohen, 1883), pp. 475-476. Cf. pp. 565-566, 579-584. 34W. Wundt, Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, 3 vols. (6th ed.; Leipzig: Engelmann, 1910), Vol. II, pp. 525 f., 718f., 735. 35J. Sully, The Human Mind, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1892), Vol. I, p. 9. 36G. T. Ladd, Elements of Physiological Psychology (New York: Scribner's, 1900), pp. 387-397; cf. pp. 427, 467. 37H. Hoffding, Outlines of Psychology, trans. M. E. Lowndes (London: Macmillan, 1891), pp. 200-205. Cf. R. Geijer, "Darstellung und Kritik der Lotze'schen Lehre von den Lokalzeichen," Philosophische Monatshefte, 1885, 21:545 f.; H. H6ffding, "Lotze's Lehren uiberRaum und Zeit und R. Geijer's Beurtheilung derselben," Phil. Monatsh., 1888, 24:424-428.

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that "successive apprehension," the empiristic component, comes arbitrarily close to the nativistic assumption of immediately given knowledge, if only we limit what is added by association and maximize what is contained in the initial presentation. It is doubtless significant that the two prominent representatives of Position IV in the 1870s did not mention local signs or Lotze. The local sign was a superfluous concept in the mature physiological theory of Karl Vierordt in 1877 and Ewald Hering in 1879. Spatial values were ascribed to the retina by Hering in 1864, and in 1879 he reiterated his position in "The Spatial Sense and the Motion of the Eye."'38 Like Johannes Muller, he believed that the motions of the eyes correspond in their altitude and azimuth values just as the retinas do. For Vierordt, too, there are "organs of the spatial sense," such that "sensations have the immanent character of the spatial."39 Both Hering and Vierordt were careful to qualify their positions, though; despite the fact that spatiality is in the sensation, experience is a large factor in its further localization. Meanwhile, the psychological nativism of Position V was gaining adherents both on the Continent and in America. It derived physiological support from Position IV, differing only in its more intricate philosophical derivation. Stumpf, who had gone beyond Lotze with his "presentations of space" in 1873, reformulated this theory in his Tonpsychologie in 1883.40Following Brentano, he subsumed sensations under judgments, making auditory as well as visual and tactual space an immediate act of judging a content, namely, extension and depth.41Alexius Meinong and his colleague Alois H6fler later developed this view of Brentano's whereby spatial presentations are characterized by immediate "referenceto an object." Ho1fler accepted Hering's law of identical visual directions, for example, as an immediately given spatial presentation.42 He was critical of extreme "empirists"such as Herbart, Lotze, and Helmholtz and extreme "nativists"such as Kant. It was typical of this neo-Kantian generation to claim originality for its phenomenalism by relegating its forebears to polar extremes. Muscular feelings and oculo-motor tendencies suddenly lost their theoretical hegemony in Position V. They were the glue of the empirist theories;43now the nativistic theories held that change in space, or motion, is immediately perceived. The familiar psychological phenomenon of "apparentmovement" was invoked in place of the physiological reflex mechanism. Ernst Mach was influential here. His book Beitrdge zur Analyse der Empfindungen appeared in 1886; it did not employ the concept of local signs, nor was it primarily concerned with spatial localization.44 Yet Mach's concept of "space-sensations" was phenomenalistic, deriving not from Stumpf but from his own early interest in illusions of movement in the work of Jan Purkynje, Pierre Flourens, and Friedrich Goltz. His innovation was the suggestion that visual space may be built up from an invisible space of motor sensations.
38E. Hering, "Der Raumsinn und die Bewegungen des Auges," in Handbuch der Physiologie, ed. L. Hermann, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Vogel, 1879), Vol. III, Pt. 1, pp. 530, 534. 39K. Vierordt, Grundriss der Physiologie des Menschen (4th ed.; Stuttgart: Enke, 1877), pp. 322-326. 40C. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1883, 1890), Vol. I, p. 4. Cf. C. Stumpf, "Zur Lokalzeichentheorie," Zeitschrift fir Psychologie, 1893, 4. 41F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, 2 vols. (1st ed., 1874; Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1924-1925), Vol. I, Ch. 7. 42A. H65fer, Psychologie (Vienna/Prague: Tempsky, 1897), pp. 284-29n, 340-346. 43See R. Smith, "The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy," History of Science, 1973, 11:75-123. 44E. Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, trans. C. M. Williams (New York: Dover, 1959; reprint of 1900 ed.), pp. 136-139. Cf. E. Mach, Grundlinien der Lehre von den Bewegungsempfindungen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1875), p. 26.

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Sympathetic to Hering, Mach, and Stumpf, and combining their positions in a novel way, was the American William James. James argued that surface sensations include the feeling of motion itself, rather than an indirect comparison of muscular or kinesthetic feelings between two points. He cited numerous physiologists to the effect that "movement is a primitive form of sensibility," for example Sigmund Exner's report that the temporal order of two sparks flashed in rapid succession could not be discriminated. This again was apparent movement. James' censure of empiristic accounts rested on two insights: (1) a primitive sensation of "extensity" and "volume" precedes developed localization in two and three dimensions, and (2) we have no need of muscular sensations to guarantee surface and depth perception. "The muscular sense," wrote James, "must . . . no longer figure in Psychology as the leading organ in space-perception which it has been so long 'cracked up' to be."45 James' point of departure from Lotze deserves special quotation:
To Lotze we owe the much-used term "local sign." He insisted that space could not emigrate directly into the mind from without, but must be reconstructed by the soul; and he seemed to think that the first reconstructions of it by the soul must be supersensational. But why sensations themselves might not be the soul's original spatial reconstructive acts Lotze fails to explain.46

James was also critical of the empiristic position of Berkeley, Reid, Helmholtz, and Wundt (Position II), because it "denies that there can be in a sensation any element of actual locality, of inherent spatial order, any tone as it were which cries to us immediately and without further ado, 'I am here' or 'I am there."'47James was doubtless responding directly to Lotze's denial of the nativistic interpretation of sensations: "qu'ils ne peuvent pas crier a l'ame, si l'on peut ainsi parler, quel est le lieu de leur origine."'48 It is worth commenting, before turning finally to Position VI, on why Lotze's theory disappeared from the center of discussions of spatial perception after about 1890. An adherent of the Austrian school of Gestalt qualities exposed the apparent inconsistencies in Lotze's various versions of his theory in 1904.49 This paper was symptomatic of a shift of theoretical interest which accompanied the sloughing off of the outdated dichotomy of empirism versus nativism. The ideological context of the times made it acceptable, from about 1900 on, to dismiss the problem of local signs with the assertion that spatial knowledge of all three dimensions is "given" in experience. In a sense, this represented an expanded definition of empirism; in another sense, it was the purest nativism. No wonder that James termed it "radical empiricism" in 1904 and Husserl christened it phenomenology in 1913.50 Position VI in spatial perception belongs to a new era which is the direct outgrowth of this trend. The focus of research was now more clearly relativistic; indeed, Max Wertheimer established Gestalt psychology in 1912 upon the familiar apparent movement which he termed the "phi phenomenon:" two flashes of light are seen as a
45W. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: H. Holt, 1890), Vol. II, p. 202; cf. pp. 171-176, and W. James, "The Perception of Space," Mind, 1887, 12:183-190. 46James, Psychology, Vol. II, p. 276; James, "Perception," p. 543. 47James, Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 157-158. 48H. Lotze, "De la formation de la notion d'espace," Revue philosophique, 1877, 4:353. 49E. Ackerknecht, Die Theorie der Lokalzeichen. Ihr Verhaltnis zur empiristischen und nativistischen Losung des psychologischen Raumproblems (Tubingen/ Leipzig: Mohr, 1904). 50J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), pp. 106-107, 547; pp. 186-188.

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moving line, and our "spatial orientation position" depends on subjective "anchoring points."'51 This was a kind of perception of surfaces, explained initially as a "shortcircuiting" of the "field-action" of the nervous system. In 1914, Kurt Koffka shifted the emphasis from psycho-physiological isomorphism to the primacy of perception over sensation.52 And in 1920, Wolfgang Kohler elaborated a theory of visual space combining both principles: (1) there is no point-to-point relationship between the psycho-physiological process on the retina and the retinal field; and (2) phenomenal space possesses characteristic properties which do not occur in the geometry of the stimulus elements.53Gestalt psychologists went beyond Stumpf (who was the mentor of Koffka and Kohler at Berlin) by claiming that depth as well as extension was given in the immediate percept. Lotze's intellectual grandchildren, so to speak, based their case on apparent movement, and in fact the feeling of movement was the original visual local sign.
CONCLUSION

The theory of local signs served to consolidate the problem area of spatial perception in the new experimental psychology, yet it was conceived broadly enough to allow for multiple interpretations and conceptual development from one end of the theoretical continuum to the other. Developed in reaction away from physiological nativism (Position IV), it issued first in a psychological empirism (Positions I, II, and III) before its reinterpretation in a more psychologically sophisticated nativism (Position V). From the beginning, however, Lotze's theory had assumed the "eccentricappearance' of location in consciousness and the lawful complexity of the physiological substrate. The empirism-nativism debate thus emerges as secondary to the real issue-the increasing reliance upon phenomenalistic reports about the data of consciousness with the specification of physiological mechanisms which make it possible. Gestalt psychologists were the first to insist upon this point (Position VI).54 This issue, and the theoretical controversies which it inspired, helped to apprbpriate for psychology an entire set of research problems, from the anatomy of the skin to the visual horopter, which had hitherto belonged to anatomy, physiology, and optics.
51 M. Wertheimer, "Experimentelle Studien Uberdas Sehen von Bewegungen," Z. Psych., 1912, 61:164, 253-257. Cf. Boring, History of Experimental Psychology, pp. 594-595. 52K. Koffka, "Psychologie der Wahrnehmung," Geisteswissenschaften, 1914, 1:711-716, 796-800. Cf. B. Petermann, The Gestalt Theory and the Problem of Configuration (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932), p. 9. 53W. Kohler, Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationdren Zustand (Erlangen: Philosophische Akademie, 1924), reprinted in W. D. Ellis, ed., A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938), pp. 35-37. 54M. Henle, "The Influence of Gestalt Psychology in America," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1977, 291:4-5.

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