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Updated: May 27, 2025
Though, as we have seen, it involves, strictly speaking, an ingredient of representation, this fact does not do away with the broad distinction between presentative and representative cognition. Introspection is presentative in the sense that the reality constituting the object of cognition, the mind's present feeling, is as directly present to the knowing mind as anything can be conceived to be.
Thus it is manifest, after a moment's reflection, that expectation, so far as it is just, is not primarily immediate in the sense in which purely presentative knowledge is so, since it can be shown to follow from something else.
Yet, while allowing a certain force to this objection I would point out, first of all, that even in sense-perception, what the individual mind is immediately certain of is its own sensations. The relatively perfect certainty which finally attaches to the presentative side of sense-perception is precisely that which finally attaches to the results of introspection.
For a great part of our knowledge is presentative, and we directly perceive the objects of Nature not less than the phenomena of Consciousness.
Whether we trace mental progression through the grades of the animal kingdom, through the grades of mankind, or through the stages of individual growth; it is obvious that the advance, alike in cognitions and feelings, is, and must be, from the presentative to the more and more remotely representative.
Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.
Sunsets and starlit skies, moonlight rippling over moving waves, fires that really burn, windows of actual glass, fountains plashing with real water, all of the naturalistic devices of the latter-day Drama of Illusion have been developed in the last few decades. Acting in Elizabethan days was a presentative, rather than a representative, art.
In order to appreciate the risks of such error, let us compare the process of self-observation with that of external perception with respect to the difficulties in the way of accurate presentative knowledge. Misreading of Internal Feelings. First of all, it is noteworthy that a state of consciousness at any one moment is an exceedingly complex thing.
In the first I know by what is called a presentative process, namely, that of sense-perception; in the second I know by a representative process, namely, that of reproduction, or on the evidence of memory. In the one case the object of cognition is present to my perceptive faculties; in the other it is recalled by the power of memory.
In the second place, the pre-existing mental states at the time of revival are essential conditions. It is now known that every recollection is determined by some link of association, that every mnemonic image presents itself in consciousness only when it has been preceded by some other mental state, presentative or representative, which is related to the image.
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