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Updated: June 8, 2025
If the world were less than this, if the percept could not somehow become a concept, all progress would come to a standstill, and we should be no more than creatures of sensations and percepts which vanished as soon as they appeared. But these do not vanish; they persist in various ways, as after-images, concepts, memory.
For the higher flights of experience, however, especially when the unseen and merely possible has to be dealt with, percepts must give way to concepts; massive consciousness must give way to thinking by means of representations pieced together out of elements rendered distinct by previous dissection of the total impression; in short, a concrete must give way to an analytic way of grasping the meaning of things.
Already, then, we shall be nearer pure perception if we cease to consider anything but the perceptible stuff in which numerically distinct percepts are cut. Even there, however, a utilitarian division continues. Our senses are instruments of abstraction, each of them discerning a possible path of action.
All sense-impressions and percepts are doubtless accompanied by some degree of impulse to movement, though, for some reason or another, in natural and healthy sleep these impulses are restricted to the stage of faint nascent stirrings of motor activity which hardly betray themselves externally.
They become transformed at once into visual, instead of into olfactory or gustatory percepts. That is to say, the dreamer does not imagine himself smelling or tasting, but seeing an object. The contact of objects with the tactual organ is one of the best recognized causes of dreams.
Galton's interesting inquiries into the power of "visualizing" would appear to prove that many people can at will sport on the confines of the phantom world of hallucination. There is good reason to think that imaginative children tend to confuse mental images and percepts. The Hallucinations of Insanity.
And the fact that the soul is thus present in its entirety in each of its acts, its feelings, for example, or its ideas in its sensations, its recollections in its percepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, is the justifying principle of metaphors, the source of all poetry, the truth which modern philosophy proclaims with more force every day under the name of immanence of thought, the fact which explains our moral responsibility with regard to our affections and our beliefs themselves; and finally, it is the best of us, since it is this which ensures our being able to surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly, and this which constitutes the real unity of our person.
What is fact in one case may become construction in another. For example, the percepts of common experience are facts for the physicist, and constructions for the philosopher; the same applies to a table of numerical results, for the scholar who is trying to establish a theory, or for the observer and the psychologist.
A large number of such phenomena may be described as consisting in the formation of percepts or quasi-percepts in the minds of individuals under external circumstances which would not give rise to similar percepts in the case of other people. A little consideration, however, will show that this is not an adequate definition of what is ordinarily understood by an illusion of sense.
The humanist sees all the time, however, that there is no absolute transcendency even about the more absolute realities thus conjectured or believed in. The viscera and cells are only possible percepts following upon that of the outer body. The atoms again, tho we may never attain to human means of perceiving them, are still defined perceptually.
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