416 MENTAL FUNCTION 



tion of the crimson light we used in discussing sensations (page 405). 

 This might flood our consciousness as a sensation of redness but techni- 

 cally would be perceived only when we had awakened enough to realize 

 it as an objective quality or thing in the objective world affecting our- 

 selves as subjects. This objectivity of perception is one of the marvels 

 of consciousness. To the thoroughly nai've mind, it is the basal property 

 of the knowing "faculty." Even in thought in which the subject knows 

 objects within the mind the objectivity of consciousness is at least as 

 conspicuous a quality as is its subjectivity. It is one of the powers of 

 the mental process that it can perceive objects outside itself as well as 

 parts of itself. 



Besides the objectivity of perception its leading characteristic perhaps 

 is its process of synthesis or fusion. In our study of the sense-organs 

 a conspicuous fact always was the smallness and the multitude of the 

 individual sense-organs (considering the rods, cones, and fibers of the 

 membrana basilaris separate organs). Not only are the sensations from 

 these put together by the mental process in perception, but also the 

 unlike sensations from different classes of sense-organs. When we per- 

 ceive a flower we may perceive not only color and form but odor and 

 perhaps its softness and coldness and stickiness and taste of sweetness. 

 By all these means and more at once we may obtain a percept, as it is 

 called, of a lily. Various sorts of sensations have been thereby combined 

 into a representation in our minds of a particular lily. To explain this 

 marvellous process is at present quite beyond us, unless indeed we be 

 content to suppose that it is accomplished by the close association or 

 fusion of sensory impulses in the brain. 



CONCEPTION. If our knowing " faculties" went no farther and were 

 no more complex than perception, civilization would never have evolved 

 even as far as it has. Speech would have been undreamed of, as it 

 probably is still among the brutes. Perception in some way connects 

 consciousness with particular, individual objects or groups of objects, 

 thus giving us a mental image of them. Conception goes much farther. 

 It picks out the characteristic qualities and relations of objects, combines 

 and fuses them, and leaves us possessed of a general idea of the object 

 or of its qualities and relations by which a similar one can again be known. 



The concept is then the product given us by the process conception, 

 the nature of which is best indicated by an example which will bring out 

 how it differs from perception. Perhaps we can do no better than to 

 use our old illustration of a black-painted wooden chair standing before 

 us but never perceived by us before. How do we know this chair? 

 Only through our senses, certainly. Only because the color of the object 

 differs from that of its background more or less, vision shows us its shape 

 and size and (indirectly perhaps) that it occupies space and is not a 

 painted image on a screen. This last is inference merely, for a suffi- 

 ciently cunning artist might paint it on a screen so as to quite deceive us. 

 If we go up and touch the chair we shall find it hard ; if we saw off one of 

 its legs we shall see that it is made of wood, screws, etc., of certain 



