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ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
and the thing sensed. We first distinguish between the organism and its 
environment and then ask at what particular point the sensation arises. 
We find it impossible to fix the point and are driven to conclude either that 
there is no sensation, or that all is sensation — conclusions which virtually 
coincide, since they both leave no meaning to the term. It is clear from this 
that the term should be banished from epistemology and limited to the 
empirical uses mentioned above. 
Professor W. P. Montague offered the following objections to the de¬ 
structive criticisms of Professor Dewey. Though a sensation does not 
occur in isolation, yet every perceptual experience has a distinguishable 
sensory side. We have the same right to distinguish it as we have to dis¬ 
tinguish the form and the color of objects, which also never occur in isolation 
from each other. There is this objection to regarding the sensory qualities 
as the apex of a long process of development: that, instead of being complex, 
they seem to be simple in their nature and their external causes seem to be 
simple processes. It is likely that to simple processes in the external world 
should correspond simple effects in the organism, such correspondence being 
relatively independent of evolutionary development. It is also true that the 
shock experience arises very often from stimuli which are simple, so that 
there is reason for relating the experience of shock to the sensory qualities, 
as is done in the conventional use of the term sensation to cover both sorts 
of fact. The speaker also called attention to a metaphysically puzzling 
feature of sensation, namely, its “specious present,” or seeming occupancy 
of a segment of past time at each moment of its existence; but this, he 
thought, was accounted for in the concept of sensation as a form of potential 
energy into which the kinetic energy of the neural current is transformed at 
the moment of its redirection in the central nervous system, or even at the 
moments of its transit through all the various synapses traversed by it. 
Professor R. S. Woodworth advanced the concept of sensory as dis¬ 
tinguished from perceptual centers in the cortex, the sensory centers being 
those which first received the incoming stimuli from the sense organs. Ac¬ 
cording to this neurological conception, there should be a difference in time 
between the sensation and the percept, but it must be admitted that it is 
usually impossible to detect, introspectively, an interval between the first 
reception of the stimulus and the percept of some object or process. This 
introspective difficulty has led Professor Pillsbury, in a recent and still 
unpublished lecture, to the conclusion that there is nothing in consciousness 
except meanings. From this point of view, it would be honest to give up 
the concept of sensation in psychology and so speak simply of the stimulus 
and of the percept. Though these two would be sufficient for most instances 
of perception, there remain certain objections to giving up the concept of 
