MENTAL FUNCTION 405 



Before we try, however unsuccessfully, to understand how the 

 " product" of the myriad end-organs fuse into the continuum of conscious- 

 ness, let us look at the nature of a sensation in general from the descrip- 

 tive standpoint. It is true that a sensation, properly speaking, cannot be 

 described, but it can be marked off from the other aspects of the mental 

 process in a way which amounts more or less to description. Suppose, 

 then, a newly born infant waking from sleep in a room brilliantly lighted 

 by sunlight entering through bright crimson window-shades. For a 

 longer or a shorter period this newborn infant's consciousness we might 

 suppose would be largely a pure sensation of redness. This redness- 

 sensation it is obvious can be described only by reference to similar 

 experience no mere words could ever make one blind from birth 

 realize what redness is like. To this child whose consciousness as yet 

 had not had time to develop its various latent aspects, the red-sensation 

 would for the time be all-inclusive and it would be essentially a pure 

 unmixed sensation, namely of redness. Now suppose an adult awaken- 

 ing gradually in the same sun-lit room early in the morning after too few 

 hours of sleep. When his eyes opened the sensation of redness would 

 more or less monopolize also his mental process, and his whole conscious- 

 ness might for a few seconds be only of this one all-pervading redness. 

 Theoretically, then, even an adult may have sensations unmixed with 

 the other aspects of mind, "pure" sensations. In fact, however, pure 

 sensations in the adult are both rare and very brief. Thus, in the 

 example cited, within a few seconds other conscious elements would 

 begin to fuse into the sensation of redness, elements of knowing and of 

 willing. The man would begin almost at once to think and to intend 

 or to wish or to fear or to enjoy or to do something else among the numer- 

 ous possible processes of his mental action. The flood of crimson sun- 

 light would continue to pervade his experience, but previous experiences 

 with all their multiform traces and activities would have already begun 

 to arise in the man's memory and to take possession of his mind. He 

 would then no longer experience a pure sensation in his mind, but rather 

 the usual complex, variously composed of feeling-elements more or less 

 mixed with elements of cognition and of will. Thus, then, we see what 

 sensation as such is : it is the consciousness corresponding to the activity 

 of one sort of sensory end-organ. Sometimes only one of these end- 

 organs may be concerned in a sensation, but often there are thousands, 

 as in the example given. The number matters not so long as the result- 

 ing consciousness is a strictly homogeneous experience of the sort now 

 sufficiently suggested. 



Fusion is one of the most basal operations of the mental process. Its 

 simplest form brings about the cohesion of the sensory elements (really 

 represented by sense-organ elements) into actual sensations which, for 

 the naive multitude, are themselves elementary. The trained musician, 

 the tea-taster, the skilled color-mixer, whether artist or artisan, the intro- 

 spective psychologist, all and many others, have more or less the means of 

 reducing perhaps even to their lowest, that is organic, terms, the sensory 



