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Updated: September 25, 2025
The best percepts for the purpose are the emblematic or symbolic ones. Yet other percepts may be used. For it does not depend at all on what the percepts contain, but solely on the fact that the soul puts forth all its powers in order not to have anything in the consciousness except the one percept in question.
The special force that belongs to the representative element in a percept, as compared with that of a pure "perceptional" image, is probably connected with the fact that, in the case of actual perception, the nervous process underlying the act of imaginative construction is organically united to the initial sensational process, of which indeed it may be regarded as a continuation.
Hallucination, by which I mean the projection of a mental image outwards when there is no external agency answering to it, assumes one of two fairly distinct forms: it may present itself either as a semblance of an external impression with the minimum amount of interpretation, or as a counterfeit of a completely developed percept.
The true distinction between a percept and a concept is just that a percept is a concept associated with the dynamic system discovered in and by our exertional activity. In like manner we find here the true solution of the many questions which have been raised as to the distinction between general and abstract, singular and concrete terms.
Gurney has defined a hallucination as 'a percept which lacks, but which can only by distinct reflection be recognised as lacking, the objective basis which it suggests' and by 'objective basis, he means 'the possibility of being shared by all persons with normal senses'. Nobody but the 'percipient' was present on the occasion just described, so we cannot say whether other people would have seen the visitor, or not.
If some interest directs our attention to a particular quality of objects, that quality will be prominent in our percept; it may even be the only content clearly given in our general idea; and any object, however similar in other respects to those of the given class, will at once be distinguished as belonging to a different species if it lacks that characteristic on which our attention is particularly fixed.
Much less can psychology dispute the validity of a percept if it cannot be sure that the mind adds nothing to sensation and its grouping; that in the genesis of the perceptive state, with its intuition of something external and now present as object, nothing like a form of intelligence is superimposed on the elements of sensation, giving to the result of their coalescence the particular unity which we find.
But the philosopher, ascending again from the percept to the concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive reality that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing away with the materiality that lessens being, grasps being itself in the immutable system of Ideas.
We throw our concept forward, get a foothold on the consequence, hitch our line to this, and draw our percept up, travelling thus with a hop, skip and jump over the surface of life at a vastly rapider rate than if we merely waded through the thickness of the particulars as accident rained them down upon our heads.
I may observe that in this analysis of perception I shall endeavour to keep to known facts, namely, the psychical phenomena or events which can be seen by the methods of scientific psychology to enter into the mental content called the percept. I do not now inquire whether such an analysis can help us to understand all that is meant by perception. This point will have to be touched later on.
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