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Updated: May 7, 2025
It would seem to be clear that there is a sequence of dominance in the faculties of the intellect. First, the only means of acquiring knowledge is through sense-perception. But memory dawns far down in the animal kingdom. And thus the animal begins to associate past experience with present objects.
Accordingly nature as disclosed in sense-perception is self-contained as against sense-awareness, in addition to being self-contained as against thought. I will also express this self-containedness of nature by saying that nature is closed to mind. This closure of nature does not carry with it any metaphysical doctrine of the disjunction of nature and mind.
The directness of such apprehension makes it analogous to sensation or sense-perception; but it is on his view in the end due to the existence or activity in man of that power in him which is the highest thing in his nature, and akin to or identical with the divine nature mind, or intelligence.
They cease to deceive us if we confront them with our thinking insight and submit what they tell us to its examination. But how could our thinking insight sit in judgment on the declarations of the senses, unless there were something living within it which transcends sense-perception?
It is a difficult psychological question whether sense-perception involves thought; and if it does involve thought, what is the kind of thought which it necessarily involves. Namely, nature is not thought. But this is a different question, namely that the fact of sense-perception has a factor which is not thought.
He who fails to see this, being engrossed in the visible only, goes from death to death; because he clings to external forms which are perishable. Only the essence which dwells within is unchangeable and imperishable. This knowledge of the oneness of visible and invisible, however, cannot be acquired through sense-perception. It can only be attained by the purified mind. This verily is That.
But if it is conceived as sense-awareness of a factor in fact competent to evoke emotion and purposeful action without further cognition, then it does not involve thought. In such a case the terminus of the sense-awareness is something for mind, but nothing for thought. The sense-perception of some lower forms of life may be conjectured to approximate to this character habitually.
Our study of the errors of sense-perception will, moreover, prove the best preparation for an inquiry into the nature and mode of production of the remaining two varieties. I would add that, in close connection with the first division, illusions of perception, I shall treat the subtle and complicated phenomena of dreams.
In reality, the consciousness kindled by outer sense-perception was preceded by a dreaming consciousness, and this by a sleeping consciousness, both for the individual and for humanity as a whole. So, too, outer vision by means of the physical apparatus of the eye was preceded by an inner vision.
The mere pleasurable excitement of the senses is hardly to be called beauty. An object to be beautiful must express a harmony of relations and hence a meaning, a meaning which goes beyond sense-perception and does not stop with the intellect, but reaches the spirit. Psychologists tell us that "a curved line is pleasing because the eye is so hung as best to move in it."
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