320 Animal Life and Intelligence. 



Some of the constructs are endowed with activities, 

 and some with feelings akin to our own. Finally, in the 

 field of vision which we construct or reconstruct, the objects 

 are seen to stand in relationship to each other, and the 

 scene as a whole is perceived to be part of an orderly 

 sequence of events. 



We have already got a long way beyond the impressions 

 with which we started ; and yet, if I may trust my own 

 experience, such construction as I have described is direct 

 and immediate. A child of four or five would not only 

 construct as much, but might not improbably go a long 

 way further, and say, " Naughty boy to throw a stone at 

 poor doggie ! " It is, I say, direct and immediate, and it 

 implies a wonderful amount of mental activity. Some 

 people seem to imagine that in the simpler forms of per- 

 ception, as when I see an orange on the table, the mind is 

 as passive as the sensitive plate in a photographer's camera. 

 This surely is not so. It is a false and shallow psychology 

 which teaches it. Just as a light pin-prick may set agoing 

 complex physical activities in the frog, so may compara- 

 tively simple visual sensations give rise to complex mental 

 activities in construction and reconstruction. It is to 

 emphasize this mental activity that I have persistently 

 used the terms "construct" and "construction." And I 

 wish to emphasize it still further by saying that without 

 the active and constructive mind no such process of con- 

 struction or reconstruction is possible or (I speak for 

 myself) conceivable. We might just as well suppose that 

 the frog could leap away on stimulation of a pin-prick in 

 the absence of its complex bodily organization, as that 

 sensation could give rise to construction and reconstruc- 

 tion in the absence of a highly organized mind. 



We have seen that when a howl suggested the construct 

 dog, that construct was vague and undefined ; but when I 



in the phenomenal guise under which we know it, I would reply — Not so ; 

 for it is to the existence under this phenomenal guise that we apply the word 

 "object." In philosophical language, the existence, stripped of its pheno- 

 menal aspect, is called the Ding an sich. Its essential character is its inde- 

 pendence of man ; and hence its uhknowahility. 



