The Internal Senses — Functions or Powers? Part I

J. A. Gasson

Abstract

Fashion in thinking in philosophy and psychology are, like fashions is women’s hats, unpredictable yet oddly compelling. Fashions in thinking last a little longer but the reasons for their rise are often no more understandable than the reasons for their dying out. As examples we might take the spate of Realisms: Neo-Realism, Critical Realism, Physical Realism, etc., that appeared in the learned reviews of the Twenties and are nowadays seldom mentioned; or the New Look flurry in the psychology of perception in the Fifties which has given way to a kind of amphibious existentialism.

The result of these currents in the stream of thought has been the formation of sloughs or bayous which remain quietly unvisited and unexplored. These “backwaters”, though often small, are nonetheless interesting as well as navigable and will repay investigation, if only by confirming the notion that profit is where you find it.

When one looks over the literature on philosophical psychology that has been published in the last twenty years, one finds that there is a notable absence of discussion concerning the nature and function of the powers we call the interior senses. Except in the usual run of textbooks, we find but little even in the journals. And in the textbooks exactly the same things are being said that were said by John of St. Thomas and before him. In positive psychology, these sensory functions are dealt with, though under different names, e.g., sense consciousness, memory, imagination. There is a wealth of literature, for instance, on projective techniques which do tap the products of interior sense functioning. But most psychologists consider projective tests as “perceptual”. The meaning attached to the term “perception” is so wide and the term so global that the information about interior senses contained in these researches is like metal in any ore; it requires more labor in extracting than was used in gathering the ore.