§ 39. =Direct Apprehension.=—We saw on p. 120 that meaning, which was at first a fringe of mental processes, a contextual setting of some bit of bare experience, may in course of time be carried by nerve-processes which have no mental correlates of any kind. The same thing seems to hold of recognition. We do not, in strictness, ‘recognise’ the clothes that we put on every morning, or the desk at which we are accustomed to write; we =apprehend= them, directly, as our clothes and our desk; we take them for granted. The feeling of familiarity, the feeling of being at home with our own things, changes first to something that is still a feeling, though weaker and more nebulous; to something that we may describe as an ‘of-course’ feeling, which is still some distance away from sheer indifference. As the days and weeks go on, this of-course feeling itself dies out; the stimuli no longer have power to arouse a feeling at all, and the organism faces the habitual situations without any organic stir. We apprehend the clothes and desk _as_ ours, precisely as we perceive the tree and the piano _as_ spatial (p. 115). In experiments on the recognition of greys, the author has reported positively that a particular grey had been seen before, without being able to find anything whatsoever, in the way of verbal idea or kinæsthetic quiver or organic thrill, that might carry the meaning of familiarity; the brain-habit just touched off the report ‘Yes,’ and that was all that could be said. _That brain-habit, however, had a psychological history behind it; and the history shows itself whenever our direct apprehension is in some manner disturbed or prevented._ We reach out to our inkstand, and find that the pen which always lies in it has disappeared; or we glance round the breakfast-room, and notice that a picture which always hangs upon a certain wall has gone. We have not been wont to recognise the pen and the picture; they were just matters of course. Now that they are absent, however, the situation jars upon us; we have a pronounced feeling of helplessness or of displeased surprise. That is as far, perhaps, as ordinary observation goes; but there is really more to be observed. For at the moment of disturbance, before the disagreeable feeling has arisen, the ‘of-course’ feeling springs up in unusual strength; it is as if, for a brief space, we reverted in imagination to a true recognition of the missing object. And even after the displeasure is there, we may go back more than once to the familiar state of affairs; we can’t believe, as we say, we can’t trust our eyes, the thing has always been in that place; so that the glow of recognition alternates with the dominant feeling. In a word, _the disturbance of apprehension has brought back to life certain stages in the past history of the brain-habit_, stages in which the nerve-processes had as their correlates the mental processes that make up the feeling of familiarity.