General. Chapter I. Distinctive Characteristics Of The Perceptual Consciousness.

§ 1. Definition. — Perception is essentially Cognition. We cannot perceive without perceiving something. Thus perception essentially involves that reference to an object which we disregarded in treating of sensation. But perceiving is a special mode of cognition; it is that special mode which immediately depends on the actual presence of an object to the senses. It may in fact be defined as the cognitive function of sensation. It is contrasted with that mode of cognition which takes place through ideal images. Such images are not dependent on the actual presence of an object to the senses. They are representations of absent objects which have already been perceived. Thus the existence of perception is a precondition of the existence of ideal images. Direct cognisance of present objects must precede ideal representation of absent objects.

Even in the direct cognition of present objects, association and reproduction play a very important part. But in perception, taken in the strictest sense of the word, only those forms of association and reproduction enter which we have called complication and acquirement of meaning, together with that peculiar mode of free reproduction by which general states of nervous and mental excitement and their concomitant organic sensations are revived.*

Though association and reproduction are essential to the development of perceptual consciousness, they do not seem to be necessary to its existence in the most rudimentary form. This seems rather to depend on inherited constitution of the nervous system.

Perception is never merely cognition. It has also a cognitive character and a feeling-tone. When we speak of perceptual process, we include these factors.

* See bk. i., ch. ii., § 8 Acquirement of Meaning § 9 The Various Modes of Specific Reproduction. The student should keep the whole of this chapter in mind at the present point.