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Updated: May 27, 2025
In an act of moral consciousness two things are involved: a perception or judgment, and a sentiment or feeling. But the judgment itself may be farther divided into two parts: 'the one, an individual fact, presented now and here; the other, a general law, valid always and everywhere. This is the distinction between presentative and representative Knowledge.
It is not at all unlikely that the several confusions of self touched on in this chapter have had something to do with the genesis of the various historical theories of a transformed existence, as, for example, the celebrated doctrine of metempsychosis. Our knowledge is commonly said to consist of two large varieties Presentative and Representative.
In the sphere of memory, again, illusion is determined, as such, now by attending more carefully to the contents of memory, now by a process of reasoning from some presentative cognition.
This appears to involve an intensification of the mental image, transforming it from a representative to a presentative mental state, making it approximate somewhat to the full intensity of the sensation. In many of our instantaneous perceptions these two stages are indistinguishable to consciousness.
It follows from this that, though an error of the latter sort might conceivably have its origin in one of the former; though, for example, a man's illusory opinion of himself might be found to involve errors of introspection, yet the two kinds of illusion would be sufficiently unlike. The latter would be a simple presentative error, the former a compound representative error.
Thus far we have been dealing with Presentative Illusions, that is to say, with the errors incident to the process of what may roughly be called presentative cognition. We have now to pass to the consideration of Representative Illusion, or that kind of error which attends representative cognition in so far as it is immediate or self-sufficient, and not consciously based on other cognition.
On glancing back I saw that the section was headed "On Language," and I at once recognized the cause of my error in the pre-existence in my mind of the representative image of the word "language." In concluding this short account of the errors of insight, I may observe that their range is obviously much greater than that of the previously considered classes of presentative illusion.
It is evident that this intense action of the presentative faculty is no longer at the disposal of the writer of Samson. In Paradise Regained we are conscious of a purposed restraint of strength. The simplicity of its style is an experiment, an essay of a new theory of poetic words.
If, however, the reader will recall what was said in an earlier chapter about the possibility of error in recognizing the quality of a sense-impression, he will be prepared for a similar possibility here. What we are accustomed to call a purely presentative cognition is, in truth, partly representative.
This holds good even of the simplest kinds of error in which a presentative element is wrongly classed; and it holds good of those more conspicuous errors of perception, memory, expectation, and compound belief, in which representations connect themselves in an order not perfectly answering to the objective order.
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