122 COSMIC PHILOSOFHY. [pt, il 



definite cognition by an infant. If the foregoing analysis be 

 taken as correct, it is obvious that when any object, as an 

 orange, is first presented to the mind of an infant, it cannot 

 be perceived or identified as an orange. Before this intel- 

 lectual feat can be achieved, there must go on for some time 

 that complicated grouping of visual, tactual, and gustatory 

 sensations above described. In accordance with the esta- 

 blished theory of vision, we must admit that, when the 

 orange is held before the child's eye, the only sensation 

 aroused is that of a reddish-yellow colour, which cannot even 

 be perceived to be round until after it has been associated 

 with sundry tactual sensations. But this is n§t all. Not 

 even the sensation of a reddish-yellow colour can acquire 

 definite shape in consciousness, until sensations of blue, or 

 red, or green, or white colour, have been aroused, with which 

 it can be contrasted, and until a subsequent like sensation of 

 reddish-yellow colour has been aroused to which it can be 

 assimilated. Observe, now, the position into which we are 

 brought. We are obliged to hold that the first sensation of 

 orange-colour cannot, strictly speaking, exist as a sensation 

 at all ; wliile, nevertheless, a subsequent sensation of orange- 

 colour (not, in any actual case, the second, but the twentieth 

 or hundredth) occurring after intervening sensations of blue 

 or green, can acquire definite shape as a sensation by being 

 compared with this first sensation which is not strictly a 

 sensation. Obviously, then, though the first presentation of 

 orange-colour cannot awaken a visual sensation which can be 

 known as such, it must produce some psychical state which 

 is real, though not known. For if no psychical state were 

 produced by the first presentation, then the second, or 

 twentieth, or hundredth presentation could no more awaken 

 a definite state of consciousness than the first. We are thus 

 led to the assertion that states of consciousness may be 

 produced by the differential grouping or compounding of 

 psychical states which are beneath consciousness. 



