If there were no mental processes other than sense-perceptions and causal judgments, every man's mind would be the useless repository of a vast collection of facts, each literally true, but all without arrangement, association or utility. Our notion of what the outside world is like would be very different from what it is. We would have no concrete "ideas" or conceptions, such as "house," "book," "table," and so on. Instead, all our "thinking" would be merely an unassorted jumble of simple, disconnected sense-perceptions. What, then, is the process that unifies these isolated sense-perceptions and gives us our knowledge of things as concrete wholes? CHAPTER III CLASSIFYING JUDGMENTS [Sidenote: _The Marvel of the Mind_] A Classifying Judgment associates and compares present and past sense-perceptions. It is the final process in the production of that marvel of the mind, the "idea." The simple perception of a sensation unaccompanied by any other mental process is something that never happens to an adult human being. In the infant's mind the arrival of a sense-impression arouses only a perception, a consciousness of the sense-impression. In the mind of any other person it awakens not only this present consciousness but also the _associated_ memories of past experiences. [Sidenote: _The Indelible Impress_] Upon the slumbering mind of the newborn babe the very first message from the sense-organs leaves its exquisite but indelible impress. The next sense-perception is but part of a state of consciousness, in which the memory of the first sense-perception is an active factor. This is a higher type of mental activity. It is a something other and more complex than the mere consciousness of a sensory message and the decision as to its source. The moment, then, that we get beyond the first crude sense-perception _consciousness consists not of detached sensory images but of "ideas," the complex product of present sense-perceptions, past sense-perceptions and the mental processes known to psychology as association and discrimination_. [Sidenote: _How Ideas are Created_] Every concrete conception or idea, such as "horse," "rose," "mountain," is made up of a number of associated properties. It has mass, form and various degrees of color, light and shade. Every quality it possesses is represented by a corresponding visual, auditory, tactual or other sensation.