34 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



wave of excitement that traverses the auditory nerves. It 

 is a reaction of something, call it as you will, mind or brain, 

 but certainly of a preformed structure. To the fashioning 

 of that structure there have gone in the first place certain 

 factors of heredity, in the second certain factors of experi- 

 ence. Of these last the most obvious is that I have heard 

 similar sounds before, and have connected them with a bird, 

 and have been told in childhood that that bird is called a 

 lark. If I had to justify my original judgment I should 

 have presumably to advert to experiences of that kind. My 

 perceptive judgment would appear as a kind of inference in 

 which previous experiences figured as an inductive premise, 

 and it is very easy here to fall into the confusion of sup- 

 posing some such inference actually to take place when I 

 merely give a thing a name. It is tempting to break up the 

 process into elements as (a) a certain sound, (b) the sub- 

 sumption of this sound under a general conception of lark's 

 song, and (c) a concluding, inferential judgment c that is a 

 lark.' In actual consciousness of course nothing of the 

 sort takes place. What has actually happened is that past 

 experiences have so prepared the mental structure that it 

 reacts to a given physical stimulus with the judgment c that 

 is a lark.' The chain of causation is parallel to that of the 

 analysed inference. The same elements are there, and the 

 effect is the same, but they are never, except as now by a 

 writer seeking an illustration, analysed out and then put 

 together in an articulate whole. This relation is general. 

 On all sides experience leaves results on the mind-structure 

 which function as inferences, but are not inferences. Very 

 often we cannot on being challenged discover through 

 memory the experiences which have caused the modifica- 

 tion. An object is charged with emotional suggestions, a 

 scent or a colour-pattern stirs our liking or disliking, and 

 we can find in the recesses of memory no experience to 

 account for it. The results of old experiences are for us 

 woven into the texture of the object. More accurately 

 they have come to qualify our perceptive reaction to a 

 stimulus. The content of this perception therefore, and irt 

 particular the feeling-tone which qualifies it, may be said to 

 stand for and reflect in the mind the nature of the experi- 



