Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/482

ILLUSOEY PSYCHOLOGY. 481 as it occurs to A it occurs to no one else ; exactly as it occurs to A once it never occurs to A twice. It is an absolutely unique stream of events, or of states and changes, in A's consciousness, constituting A's experience. It is experience as given, the data out of which what is called ordinary experience is built up. It is an unique stream, and it is a stream of data as immediately perceived. Thirdly, advert to another point, and here we reach the turning-point of the explanation. A is not merely a perceiv- ing, but also a thinking creature. Pari passu, or rather throughout interwoven, with this stream of percepts in A's experience, arid as part of the condition enabling its trans- formation into the experience of ordinary life, that is, of seeing and dealing with men and things, there goes on a -comparing, contrasting, classifying process among, between, with, or upon the data. Every act of attention to a percept is the commencement of a generalisation, a commencement which needs only the occurrence of similar percepts, or the knowledge that such are possible, to become ipso facto a generalisation of the original percept, which then assumes a representative, that is, a general character. Attention first abstracts, or picks it out, from its original context ; involun- tary experience does the rest ; and a general thought, a conception of the re-active mind made pregnant by percep- tion (the phrase conciperc animo being analogous to the phrase cancipere utero), a concept inclusive of possible future experi- ence, is the result. Generalisation supervenes unconsciously and completes unawares the conscious and volitional act of attention, with which thought begins. But now suppose, in the first place, that this thought is directed, not to build up a world of men and things out of the data, but to the contemplation of the data themselves, of experience simply as experience. How are the results embodied, and in what shape do they appear? They are embodied, not indeed in natural objects, but still always in .general conceptions, expressed by general terms, and are no longer either pure percepts or in a purely perceptual order. They are grouped, classified, and sub-classified, but appear always henceforward in general, not individual shape. There is loss as well as gain in this. No form of conceptual thought or of language is ever adequate to repre- sent an individual percept or complex of percepts ; they are represented and expressed, more or less nearly, by limiting one general term by another, as for instance a particular shade of blue is perceived by consciousness immediately as that particular shade, but is thought by consciousness mediately as