CH. XV.] THE COMPOSITION OF MIND. 109 



room or in the landscape are not in contact with his body ; 

 and it is only after a similar elaborate comparison that 

 the young cliild achieves the feat of looking at an object in 

 a given direction, or of recognizing by vision its father or 

 mother. Accordingly, when looking about the room, all that 

 you really see is a congeries of coloured spots. Your know- 

 ledge of the presence of divers objects — chairs, windows, mir- 

 ror, mantel-piece — is not given in the act of vision, but is the 

 result of an exceedingly complex, though apparently instan- 

 taneous, process of reasoning. Your seemingly immediate 

 knowledge that a certain group of coloured spots means a chair 

 is due to the fact, that from early infancy this group of coloured 

 spots, or some other like group, has been associated with sun- 

 dry impressions of touch and resistance, and with sensations 

 yielded by the little muscles which turn the eye hither and 

 thither. The frequency with which the association has been 

 repeated has rendered the process of inference automatic, just 

 as, to a less-marked extent, the process of reading, at first 

 accompanied by a conscious classification of every letter, has 

 become automatic, so that we are not aware of cognizing 

 the letters at all. Nevertheless, although too rapid to rise 

 into consciousness, the process is still one of inference, imply- 

 ing, like any other process of inference, the grouping of cer- 

 tain relations as like or unlike certain other relations. Cer- 

 tain correlated grouj)S of colours are automatically classified 

 vith other correlated groups of colours previously received 

 ipon the retina, and also with certain correlated groups of 

 muscular and tactual impressions, previously received simul- 

 taneously with the groups of colours in question. Thus our 

 visual perception of objects consists cf a group of sensations 

 phts a complicated series of inferences which does not differ 

 mndamentally from a course of scientific drimonstration. And 

 the same truth may be, with equal justice, though less vividly, 

 illustrated in the case of any other sense than sight. A much 

 simpler case than that of visual perception is that of a spoon, 



