Amorphous space, atoms jostling against each other, are only our tactile perceptions made objective, set apart from all our other perceptions on account of the special importance which we attribute to them, and made into independent realities,—thus contrasting with the other sensations which are then supposed to be only the symbols of these. Indeed, in the course of this operation, we have emptied these tactile sensations of a part of their content; after having reduced all other senses to being mere appendages of the sense of touch, touch itself we mutilate, leaving out everything in it that is not a mere abstract or diagrammatic design of tactile perception: with this design we then go on to construct the external world. Can we wonder that between this abstraction on the one hand, and sensations on the other, no possible link is to be found? But the truth is that space is no more without us than within us, and that it does not belong to a privileged group of sensations. All sensations partake of extensity; all are more or less deeply rooted in it; and the difficulties of ordinary realism arise from the fact that, the kinship of the sensations one with another having been extracted and placed apart under the form of an indefinite and empty space, we no longer see either how these sensations can partake of extensity or how they can correspond with each other.
Contemporary psychology is more and more
