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Updated: June 8, 2025
Terribly confusing all these new sense-impressions were to Stern and Beatrice in their unnerved and weakened state. And, staring about them as they went, they slowly moved along with the motion of their captors toward the great light. All at once Stern stopped, with a startled cry. "The infernal devils!" he exclaimed, and recoiled with an involuntary shudder from the sight that met his eyes.
If, as I have said, all recognition takes place by overlooking points of diversity, the mind must, in course of time, acquire a habit of not attending to the exact quality of sense-impressions in all cases where the interpretation seems plain and obvious.
May we under such circumstances describe any clerk as in a telephone exchange? as receiving messages? as no nearer to his subscribers than his end of the wire? May we say that sense-impressions come flowing in to him? The whole figure of the telephone exchange becomes an absurdity when we have once placed the exchange within the clerk.
Illusions of memory illustrate rather a process of wrong classing, that is to say, of wrongly identifying the present mental image with past fact, which is the initial step in all inference. In this way they closely resemble those slight errors of perception which are due to erroneous classing of sense-impressions.
The keenest sense-impressions are undoubtedly those of contrast. In looking back over a variety of experience, I have no hesitation at all in selecting as the moment in which I have experienced the liveliest physical pleasure one hot afternoon in July. The thermometer might have stood anywhere. We would have placed childlike trust in any of its statements, even three figures great.
Thus, as our foregoing analysis of perception shows, he assumes that there is an external cause of our sensations, that there are material bodies in space, which act on our sense-organs and so serve as the condition of our sense-impressions.
When brain and spinal cord are injured or removed piece by piece from a pigeon or a frog, it seems as if the “soul” were eliminated piece by piece,—the capacity for spontaneous free co-ordination, for voluntary action, for the various sense-impressions, and so on from the higher to the lower.
Karl Pearson says, "We find that our sense-impressions of hardness, weight, colour, temperature, cohesion, and chemical constitution, may all be described by the aid of the motions of a single medium, which itself is conceived to have no hardness, weight, colour, temperature, nor indeed elasticity of the ordinary conceptual type."
And such comparison is continually bringing to light the fact that there is a continuity in our mental structure, that our highest thoughts and emotions lead us back to our common sense-impressions, and that consequently, in spite of all individual differences of temperament and mental organization, our inner experience is in all its larger features a common experience.
No man could, if he would, respond to all the impulses to muscular action aroused in him by sense-impressions. It would be still less possible for him to respond to every impulse to muscular action awakened from the past with the remembered thought with which it is associated. Desire, interest, attention and the selective will must pick and choose among these multitudinous tendencies to action.
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