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SYMBOLISM, ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

most immediate environment is constituted by the various organs of our own bodies, our more remote environment is the physical world in the neighbourhood. But the word ‘environment’ means those other actual things, which are ‘objectified’ in some important way so as to form component elements in our individual experience.


10. Symbolic Reference in Perceptive Experience.

Of the two distinct perceptive modes, one mode ‘objectifies’ actual things under the guise of presentational immediacy, and the other mode, which i have not yet discussed, ‘objectifies’ them under the guise of causal efficacy. The synthetic activity whereby these two modes are fused into one perception is what I have called ‘symbolic reference.’ By symbolic reference the various actualities disclosed respectively by the two modes are either identified, or are at least correlated together as interrelated elements in our environment. Thus the result of symbolic reference is what the actual world is for us, as that datum in our experience productive of feelings, emotions, satisfactions, actions, and finally as the topic for conscious recognition when our mentality intervenes with its con-