CHAPTER XIX. 



THE PERCEPTION OF 'THINGS.' 

 PEBCEPTION AND SENSATION COMPARED. 



A PUKE sensation we saw above, p. 7, to be an abstrac- 

 tion never realized in adult life. Any quality of a thing 

 which affects our sense-organs does also more than that : 

 it arouses processes in the hemispheres which are due to 

 the organization of that organ by past experiences, and the 

 result of which in consciousness are commonly described 

 as ideas which the sensation suggests. The first of these 

 ideas is that of the thing to which the sensible quality 

 belongs. The consciousness of particular material things 

 present to sen^e is nowadays called perception* The con- 

 sciousness of such things may be more or less complete ; 

 it may be of the mere name of the thing audits other essen- 

 tial attributes, or it may be of the thing's various remoter 

 relations. It is impossible to draw any sharp line of dis- 

 tinction between the barer and the richer consciousness, 

 because the moment we get beyond the first crude sensa- 

 tion all our consciousness is a matter of suggestion, and 

 the various suggestions shade gradually into each other, 

 being one and all products of the same psychological 

 machinery of association. In the directer consciousness 

 fewer, in the remoter more, associative processes are 

 brought into play. 



* The word Perception, however, has been variously used. For histor- 

 ical notices, see Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. 96. For Hamil- 

 ton perception is " the consciousness of external objects ' (ib. 28). Spencer 

 defines it oddly enough as "a discerning of the relation or relations be- 

 tween states of consciousness partly presentative and partly representative ; 

 which states of consciousness must be themselves known to the extent in- 

 volved in the knowledge of their relations " (Psychol., § 355). 



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