Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/501

THE CONSTITUTION OF THOUGHT. 487 I. SIGNIFICANCE GOVERNS ABSTRACTION AND GENERALISATION. An object or objective phase when interpreted as an anti- cipatory sign of some other has, of course, a mediate function the ground of its interest lying outside its individually bounded self. How deeply a mediating function is rooted in the character of presentations generally, may be suggested by pointing out that the main intellective function subsist- ing with low forms of organism will presumably be determined by natural selection to be that of taking cognisance of objects that stand to the organism in a relation positive or contrary of utility. I mean that it is according as things should be used, treated to some further effect, that it becomes organically profitable and intellectually economical to notice them. And, so far, 1 the evolutional raison d'etre of presenta- tions lies not just in what they at the moment psychically are, but in what may biologically or psychically come to be in consequence of their being presented. And we may say this : that the selected forms of presentation which constitute the objects of mental recognition in a low form of mind, will thus owe much of their force to a mediate importance, which a more developed intelligence, with sufficient comprehension of facts and sequences to interpret presentations as signs, might subjectively apprehend as their matter of augury their significance. Now if, under the assumed cover of a philosophic warrant of the call for which I am not oblivious, while not regard- less of the space it would require for discussion we venture to regard an object presented to some all-but-vegetal perci- pient as being in some sense the same object which displays such comparatively large psychical possibilities in my own favoured cognition of it, we may further say that the lower mental experience is determined to a relatively poor abstract of the otherwise proved psychical possibilities of the object ; and that the measure of this abstract formation is determined by the slight and simple use that can be made of the object by the organism. In other words, a kind of a priori abstrac- tion, arbitrarily ruling down the very percepts to those " gen- eralised " forms of ideation which psychology now admits to be characteristic of low forms of mind, is here conditioned by the mediate importance of objects to the organism. Quite similarly, I conceive, the higher abstract view of Room has to be left for the possible affecting of the course of mental evolution by the fact of individual feeling.