We may begin with the percept and its elements. In looking at
the vase before me I see its beautiful tints, its rounded shape,
its heavy pedestal with its rough curves, its solidity, weight,
brittleness, and other experiences which go to make up the
perception of the vase. The visual elements are given directly by
the visual perceptive experience; but whence come the seemingly
direct experiences of weight, heaviness, roughness, smoothness, and
others of the like kind? They are evidently derived from other
senses. The whole perceptive experience is of a visual character.
We take in the whole with our eye. In the organic structure of
the percept then, besides the experiences directly given by the
stimulated sense-organ, there are other experiences, sensory in
character, indirectly given, and coming from other sense organs
which are not directly stimulated.
The percept is a complicated dynamic product, and its elementary
processes are never derived from one isolated domain of sensory
experience. The activities of all the sensory domains co-operate
in the total result of an apparently simple percept. Along with
sensory processes directly stimulated, a mass of other sensory
processes becomes organized and helps to contribute to the total
result. The direct sensory elements are termed by me _primary
sensory elements_; the indirectly given experiences are termed
_secondary sensory elements_. The secondary sensory elements may be
figuratively said to cluster round the primary sensory elements as
their nucleus.
The whole perceptual experience is tinged by the character of
the primary elements which constitute the guiding nucleus, so to
say. Thus, where the primary sensory elements are visual, the
whole mass, no matter from what domain the sensory experiences
are derived, appears under the form of the visual sense, and the
percept is a visual percept. While the primary sensory elements
form, so to say, the dynamic center of the total perceptual
experience, the secondary sensory elements mainly constitute its
content. Both primary and secondary elements are sensory and
are induced peripherally; the primary directly, the secondary
indirectly. The percept then is sensory and is constituted by
primary sensory elements, or primary sensations, and by secondary
sensory elements, or secondary sensations.
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