[115] In our discussion of this preliminary question there is no attempt
to furnish what might be called an _analysis_ of the consciousness of
objectivity. This has been undertaken by various psychologists in recent
well-known contributions to the subject. For our purpose it is necessary
only to specify the intellectual and practical attitude out of which the
consciousness of objectivity arises; not the sensory "elements" or
factors involved in its production as an experience.
[116] So, on the other hand, our vague organic sensations are possibly
more instructive as they are, _for their own purpose_, than they would
be if more sharply discriminated and complexly referred.
For convenience we here meet the view under consideration with its own
terminology; we by no means wish to be understood as indorsing this
terminology as psychologically correct. The sense-quality of which we
read in "structural psychology" is, we hold, not a structural unit at
all, but in fact a highly abstract development out of that unorganized
whole of sensory experience in which reflective attention begins. There
is, for example, no such thing as the simple unanalyzable sense-quality
"red" in consciousness until judgment has proceeded far enough to have
constructed a definite and measured experience which may be symbolized
as "object-before-me-possessing-the-attribute-red." In place of the
original sensory total-experience we now have a more or less developed
perceptual (_i. e._, judgmental) total-experience. It is an instance of
the "psychological fallacy" to interpret what are really elements of
_meaning_ in a perceived object constructed in judgment (for this is the
true nature of the "simple idea of sensation" or "sense-element") as so
many bits of psychical material which were isolated from each other at
the outset, and have been externally joined together in their present
combination.
[117] The phrase is Külpe's and is used in his sense of consciousness
taken as a whole, as, for example, attentive, apperceptive, volitional,
rather than in the sense made familiar by Spencer and others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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