The obviousness of the logical contradiction of attributing to a
preliminary specific work of thought exactly the condition of affairs
which is elsewhere explicitly attributed to a psychical mechanism prior
to any thought-activity, should not blind us to its meaning and relative
necessity. The impression, it will be recalled, is a mere state of our
own consciousness--a mood of ourselves. As such it has simply _de facto_
relations as an event to other similar events. But reflective thought is
concerned with the relationship of a content or matter to other
contents. Hence the impression must have a matter before it can come at
all within the sphere of thought's exercise. How shall it secure this?
Why, by a preliminary activity of thought which objectifies the
impression. Blue as a mere sensuous irritation or feeling is given a
quality, the meaning "blue"--blueness; the sense-impression is
objectified; it is presented "no longer as a condition which we undergo,
but as a something which has its being and its meaning in itself, and
which continues to be what it is, and to mean what it means whether we
are conscious of it or not. It is easy to see here the _necessary
beginning of that activity which we above appropriated to thought as
such_: it has not yet got so far as converting coexistence into
coherence. It has first to perform the previous task of investing each
single impression with an independent validity, without which the later
opposition of their real coherence to mere coexistence could not be made
in any intelligible sense."[33]
This objectification, which converts a sensitive state into a sensible
matter to which the sensitive state is referred, also gives this matter
"position," a certain typical character. It is not objectified in a
merely general way, but is given a specific sort of objectivity. Of
these kinds of objectivity there are three mentioned: that of a
substantive content; that of an attached dependent content; that of an
active relationship connecting the various contents with each other. In
short, we have the types of meaning embodied in language in the form of
nouns, adjectives, and verbs. It is through this preliminary formative
activity of thought that reflective or _logical_ thought has presented
to it a world of meanings ranged in an order of relative independence
and dependence, and ranged as elements in a complex of meanings whose
various constituent parts mutually influence each other's meanings.[34]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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