Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 - Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. by Various
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believed it was to be explained in the same way as the illusion which
one experiences in a railway coach when another train is moving parallel with the coach in which one sits, in the same direction and at the same speed. The second train, of course, appears motionless. [5] Dodge, Raymond, PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW, 1900, VII., p. 456. [6] Graefe, A., _Archiv f. Ophthalmologie_, 1895, XLI., 3, S. 136. This explanation of Graefe is not to be admitted, however, since in the case of eye-movement there are muscular sensations of one's own activity, which are not present when one merely sits in a coach. These sensations of eye-movement are in all cases so intimately connected with our perception of the movement of objects, that they may not be in this case simply neglected. The case of the eye trying to watch its own movement in a mirror is more nearly comparable with the case in which the eye follows the movement of some independent object, as a race-horse or a shooting-star. In both cases the image remains on virtually the same point of the retina, and in both cases muscular sensations afford the knowledge that the eye is moving. The shooting-star, however, is perceived to move, and the question remains, why is not the eye in the mirror also seen to move? F. Ostwald[7] refutes the explanation of Graefe from quite different considerations, and gives one of his own, which depends on the geometrical relations subsisting between the axes of vision of the real eye and its reflected image. His explanation is too long to be here considered, an undertaking which indeed the following circumstance renders unnecessary. While it is true that the eye cannot |
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