Representation is the next form above sense-perception.
The lowest phase of representation is recollection, which
simply repeats for itself a former sense-perception or
series of sense-perceptions; in representation the mind is
free as regards external impressions; it does not require
the presence of the object, but recalls it without its own
time and place; fancy and imagination are next higher than
recollection, because the mind not only recalls images,
but makes new combinations of them, or creates them
altogether; attention is the appearance of the will in the
intellect; with attention begins the separation of the
transient from the variable in perception; memory is the
highest form of representation; memory deals with general
forms——not mere images of experience, but general types of
objects of perception; memory, in this sense, is
productive as well as reproductive; with memory arises
language.
Here we pass over to the consideration of higher forms of intellect and
will.
While mere sensation, as such, acts only in the presence of the
object——reproducing (ideally), it is true, the external object, the
faculty of representation is a higher form of self-activity (or of
reaction against surrounding conditions), because it can recall, at its
own pleasure, the ideal object. Here is the beginning of emancipation
from the limitations of time.
The self-activity of representation can summon before it the object that
is no longer present to it. Hence its activity is now a double one, for
it can seize not only what is now and here immediately before it, but it
can compare this present object with the past, and identify or
distinguish between the two. Thus recollection or representation may
become _memory_.
As memory, the mind achieves a form of activity far above that of
sense-perception or mere recollection. It must be noted carefully that
mere recollection or representation, although it holds fast the
perception in time (making it permanent), does not necessarily
constitute an activity completely emancipated from time, nor indeed very
far advanced towards it. It is only the beginning of such emancipation.
For mere recollection stands in the presence of the special object of
sense-perception; although the object is no longer present to the senses
(or to mere feeling), yet the image is present to the representative
perception, and is just as much a particular here and now as the object
of sense-perception. There intervenes a new activity on the part of the
soul before it arrives at memory. Recollection is not memory, but it is
the activity which grows into it by the aid of the activity of
attention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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