Perhaps he finds in his consciousness the perception of the table before
him which lingers for a little while in his mind. He finds no difficulty
in analyzing it into color sensations and tactual sensations; and yet he
is aware of so much more in it. The table, for instance, has form for
him and he may find that these form perceptions involve the sensations
of the eye movements which he makes from one corner of the table to the
other; he may find that if the idea lasts in him, he becomes aware of
the time by sensations of tension; he finds that in his perception of
the table lies an idea of its use, and he discovers that that is made up
of elements which are partly memory reproductions of earlier
impressions, partly sensations of movement impulses; he also finds that
the table feels smooth, and he discovers by his analysis that this
impression of smoothness results from a special combination of tactual
sensations and movement sensations; and again those movement sensations
he analyzes further into sensations of muscle contraction and sensations
of pressure in the joints and sensations of tension in the tendons.
Before a zooelogist has completed his description of a bird in the
landscape, he has given account of hundreds of thousands of things; but
before the psychologist would complete the enumeration of the mental
elements which enter into the seeing of the table, he would have to give
account of by far more psychical elements. Every point in the surface of
the table has its own light value, perhaps different in its quality and
intensity and saturation, in its hue and tint and shade from the next
one, and at whatever point of the table's edge our attention is
directed, each one involves numberless shades in the vividness of all
the other points and numberless mental relations of space perception
among the various parts of the table. In the thorough analysis of the
describing psychologist, every single idea, and in the same way, every
single emotion or feeling or judgment becomes complex like a living
organism, an aggregate of thousands of mental tissues, and yet made up
from "the stuff that dreams are made of."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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