RECORDS OF MEETINGS OF 1909. 
293 
of the central organs is part cause of the reaction, and this reaction helps 
determine the stimulus finally operative. 
3. A sensation is often conceived in psychology as a “sensory quality,” 
and these qualities are assumed to be primitive and to correspond with 
elementary processes in the sense organs. This is a good deal of an assump¬ 
tion, since the qualities are known to us only as the apex of a whole system 
of physiological functioning. We see the color of an object rather than the 
color itself; we do not start with the sensory qualities and build up the 
object by putting them together, but we begin with the object, and only 
reach the sensory quality by an elaborate process of differentiation. The 
sensory quality is a late achievement, not a primary datum. The “ele¬ 
ments” of structural psychology are the last terms of intellectual discrimina¬ 
tion. 
4. The sensory qualities — as equivalent to Locke’s simple ideas — 
are thought of as the units of knowledge, as the irreducible minimum which 
cannot be torn off by any amount of criticism of the percept. Locke, 
ho’wever, does not mean, nor would it be true, that all apparent knowledge 
is made up of simple ideas. He was interested not in tracing the genetic 
psychology of knowdedge, but in providing a logical device for testing 
knowledge and for appealing against prejudice, dogma and authority. His 
sensations were not elements of composition but ultimate, and hence ele¬ 
mentary, criteria and tests of assurance. 
5. The every-day use of the term sensation is illustrated by the phrase 
“sensational newspaper.” Here the sensation is not an element, but a 
total concrete experience, the essential fact about which is that it is a shock, 
an interruption of an adjustment which had been running smoothly. While 
the “sensory qualities” are thoroughly objective, these shock experiences 
have the true subjective quality since they have, for the instant, no meaning 
or objective reference. Their character as sensations is exhausted by this 
absence of reference; there is but one true sensory quality — the quality 
of shock. From the point of view of logic, the shock experience is valuable, 
since a state of suspended reference is the basis of the inductive method. 
Dogmatism, on the contrary, consists in the prompt interpretation of every 
new shock into terms of some well-established habit. In its true sense, the 
mental state, or the subjective, is the conscious starting point of a qualita¬ 
tively new habit. 
Professor F. J. E. Woodbridge, in following up the discussion, first dis¬ 
tinguished two meanings of the term sensation: (1) a reaction of the organism 
by means of the sense organs; and (2) the sensory qualities of objects. 
These meanings do not lead to confusion. The confusion arises when we 
pass to epistemology and inquire into the relation between the sensation 
