But the individual judgment can take another name, much better known and more familiar: _perception_; and perception, in its turn, should be called, synonymously, individual judgment, or at least _perceptive judgment._ Perception does not consist of opening the eyes, of offering the ear, and of unlocking any of the other senses, which are wont to be enumerated, nor, in general, of abandoning oneself to sensation. The world does not enter our spirit by these wide gates; but has itself announced, in order to be received with due honours. That good folk (and among the best of folk are to be counted many philosophers) think otherwise is in truth to be explained by their wonted neglect or lack of analysis and reflection. And further, perception is not intuition, _i.e.,_ an impression theoretically fashioned, or that stage or moment of the spirit which is represented in an eminent degree by the poet, who intuites and does not know what he intuites, indeed does not know that he does not know (because the pertinent question has not arisen, and cannot arise, in him, as poet). To perceive means to apprehend a given fact as having this or that nature; and so means to think and to judge it. Not even the lightest impression, the smallest fact, the most insignificant object, is perceived by us, save in so far as it is thought. Hence the supreme importance of the individual judgment, which is that which embraces all knowledge produced by us at every moment, by means of which we _possess the world,_ by means of which a _world exists._ [Sidenote: _and with the commemorative or historical judgment._] In perceptive judgments also, are comprised those judgments which are called by some _commemorative_ or _historical,_ that is to say, those by which it is recognized that a given fact has occurred in the past. This recognition can never be founded upon anything other than present intuitions, intuitions, that is to say, of our present life, which contains the past in it, and persuades us of the veracity of a given piece of evidence, as now apprehended by us. And conversely, all perceptive judgments are, in some way, commemorative and historical, because the present, in the very act by which we hold it before our spirit, becomes a past, that is to say an object of memory and of history. [Sidenote: _Erroneous distinction of individual judgments as of fact and of value._]