THE PEBGEPTION OF THINGS. 113 



from 'those ' to * A' (paths which would lead to practically 

 the same conclusion as the straighter ones), yet there is no 

 ground whatever for assuming them to be traversed now, 

 especially since appearances point the other way. In 

 explicit reasoning, such paths are doubtless traversed , in 

 perception they are in all probability closed. So far, then, 

 from perception being a species of reasoning properly so 

 called, both it and reasoning are co-ordinate varieties of that 

 deeper sort of process known psychologically as the asso- 

 ciation of ideas, and physiologically as the law of habit in 

 the brain. To call perception unconscious reasoning is thus 

 either a useless metaphor, or a positively misleading confusion 

 between tivo diferent things. 



One more point and we may leave the subject of Per- 

 ception. Sir Wm. Hamilton thought that he had discovered a 

 * great laiv' which had been wholly overlooked by psycholo- 

 gists, and which, 'simple and universal,' is this: "Knowl- 

 edge and Feeling, — Perception and Sensation, though al- 

 ways coexistent, are always in the inverse ratio of each 

 other." Hamilton wrote as if perception and sensation 

 were two coexistent elements entering into a single state 

 of consciousness. Spencer refines upon him by contending 

 that they are two mutually exclusive states of conscious- 

 ness, not two elements of a single state. If sensation be 

 taken, as both Hamilton and Sjpencer mainly take it in this 

 discussion, to mean the feeling of pleasure or pain, there is 

 no doubt that the law, however expressed, is true ; and that 

 the mind which is strongly conscious of the pleasantness or 

 painfulness of an experience is ipso facto less fitted to 

 observe and analyze its outward cause.* Apart from pleas- 

 ure and j)ain, however, the law seems but a corollary of the 

 fact that the more concentrated a state of consciousness is, 

 the more vivid it is. When feeling a color, or listening to 

 a tone per se, we get it more intensely, notice it better, than 

 when we are aware of it merely as one among many other 

 properties of a total object. The more diffused cerebral 

 excitement of the perceptive state is probably incompatible 



* See Spencer, Psychol., ii. p. 250, note, for a pliysiological hypothesis 

 to account for this fact. 



