Classification of the Human Senses

The recent edition of the Textbook of physiology, edited by Fulton, reveals the enormous strides made in this field during the past fifteen years.8 Similar advances have been achieved in the increasingly closely related discipline of experimental psychology, a science that only a few decades ago was compartmentalized into artificial groups, such as Sensation, Cerebration and Intellection, and Tendency to Action (William James). What has fundamentally changed the approach to problems in all areas of psychology is the concept of dynamic structure-a pattern of stress determined by the integration of divergent forces-as originally propounded by the gestalt psychologists Wertheimer, Kohler, Koffka, and their followers. Replacing the atomistic viewpoint of previous authors, this concept has furnished the basis for such contributions as the Topological Field Theory (K. Lewin), the Sensory-Motor Synergy Theory (W. S. Boernstein) and Sensory-Tonic Theory (H. Werner), the Cybernetic Contribution to Perception (M. Wiener, W. Pitts, and W. S. McCulloch), and, most recently, the Theory of Event-Structure (Floyd Allport). Indeed, the concept of structure plays a decisive r6le not only in the study of the personality as an articulated whole, but also of single senses-vision, audition, and touch. Yet when it comes to classifying the senses of man, to evaluating them according to one common principle, even gestalt psychologists have avoided the challenge, while other modern psychologists as well as physiologists still tend to fall back on the old blueprints of nineteencentury authors. Historically, following Johannes Muller's anatomic-physiologically oriented division of different parts of the nervous system according to specific sense-energies, H. von Helmholtz arranged the pertinent psychological entities (sensations) according to "modalities." Cataloguing the modality of vision, the modality of audition, the modality of taste, etc., he made no attempt at evaluation but merely postulated that there were no transitions from any one modality to another." From a purely physiological standpoint, Charles S. Sherrington differentiated between "exteroceptors," responding to changes in the external