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The objects of Vision appear to be displayed before us in immense multitude, each distinct from its adjacent neighbour, yet all inter-related as parts of one single whole the presentation thus constituting what is called Extensity. This is the most commonly employed meaning of the term spatial. Yet it is evidently in its origin rather temporal than spatial.
If sonorous undulations excited vibration in every resistant object of the environment they would undoubtedly come to arrange themselves in an order resembling the extensity suggested by Vision, though the slower rate of transmission of sound would detract from the practical simultaneity in the effect which, as we have seen, largely accounts for the perception of visual extensity.
This perception, if we look to its origin, may turn out to be primitive; no doubt the feeling of "crude extensity" is an original sensation; every inference, association, and distinction is a thing that looms up suddenly before the mind, and the nature and actuality of which is a datum of what to indicate its irresistible immediacy and indescribability we may well call sense.
The simultaneous occurrence of a large number of Sounds does not seem to us to present such a character. But let us suppose that all the objects which constitute obstacles to our Activity emitted Sounds by which they were recognised; it is not doubtful that these would then come to be employed by us as the guides of our Activity and would acquire in our minds the character of Extensity.
It had thus ascertained, in its own way, the succession of four strokes, but quite otherwise than by a process of addition and without bringing in the image of a juxtaposition of distinct terms. He is well aware of the results of "the breach between quality and quantity," between true duration and pure extensity.
And again, the effect of extensity is never long satisfactory unless it is superinduced upon some material beauty; the dignity of great hangings would suffer if they were not of damask, but of cotton, and the vast smoothness of the sky would grow oppressive if it were not of so tender a blue. Example of the stars.
If there is guilt, there must be also greatness, to impress that side of the canvas on our vision. It is, indeed, almost a quantitative problem. Strength, energy, depth of passion, breadth of vision, power and place, ravish our attention and our unconscious imitation. What is lacking in extensity of associative reproduction must be added in intensity.
In this there is an immense practical advantage, the result being that we come habitually to direct our every action by reference to the data of Sight. Now it is because these data so simultaneously presented are employed by us as the guides of action that their presentation acquires the character which we denominate Extensity.
In all it finds to say about the triangle it never comes to maintain that the triangle is really a square. The privilege of mathematics is simply to have offered the mind, for dialectical treatment, a material to which dialectical treatment could be honestly applied. This material consists in certain general aspects of sensation its extensity, its pulsation, its distribution into related parts.
In like manner a light which we see is referred to its objective luminous source. But light also and in addition is reflected from, and thus reveals the presence of the whole body of our resistant environment. Hence is derived the coloured presentation of Vision to which the character of extensity attaches. Nothing similar takes place in the case of the other distantial sensations.
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