It may be maintained, however, that the distinction of the activities of consciousness, of sensation, representation, and thinking, is indispensable in psychology; but, at any rate, there are no different _kinds_, or even degrees or stages of consciousness. The consciousness of any simple sensation in kind is not different from the consciousness of a world; the factor of consciousness in both is the same; the difference lies exclusively in the content. This also applies to clear and obscure consciousness. In order to determine the positive task of psychology, we ought to discover in every content and in every repeated act of consciousness, a certain common characteristic. Perception, as such, does not constitute consciousness, but merely denotes the presence of a multiple content; apperception, on the other hand, indicates only consciousness in the definite sense of a "unity" of that multiple content. This unity of consciousness properly does not appear, or only appears in the connection of the contents. That peculiarity of consciousness which we call apperception, is psychologically only apparent in the contents of consciousness; it does not constitute an object of psychology, but forms only its extreme limits. The common characteristic of every content of consciousness is therefore really to be found in the _connection_ (Verbindung) in which the simple contents are represented in the repeated acts of consciousness. This connection exists only subjectively, irrespective of all objective meaning or value. The existence of phenomena purely as phenomena, their subjective existence irrespective of object, constitutes their psychic existence or that side of the phenomenon from which it becomes an object of psychological research. Under this head come all those phenomena to which science denies an objective value: illusions of the senses, mental hallucinations, and the normal non-scientific representations of things, the creations of the imagination in music and in art, the entire subjective life of feeling and of aspiration, regarded only as a particularly characteristic association of representation, irrespective of all objective truth, which lies beyond the limits of psychology as such.