The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
In a preceding contribution to the _Revue Philosophique_ (May, 1890)
M. Payot showed that sensation is the translation into terms of
consciousness of that which, considered from the objective point
of view, is a reaction of the organism, as a whole, to an external
impression. Sensations are the irreducible element of the psychic life.
They contribute the materials which the mind modifies, combines, and
classes according to their relations, variable or invariable. This
is chronologically posterior to sensation, which has an affective
origin. The reactions corresponding to the most frequent sensations
become more and more rapid until consciousness, “which translates only
physiological states of a sufficient duration,” has not time to appear.
Here we have a reflex-act. In an intermediate zone where reactions take
a time sufficient for them to be conscious, the intellectual states,
to which the abstract name of the intellectual faculty has been given,
have birth. Differentiation operates between sensible and intellectual
facts, until they seem to belong to two irreducible faculties; but the
intellectual states are grafted on the sensible states, and although
the graft develops so greatly that the sensibility appears like a
parasite, the latter is the primitive trunk and through it the graft
exists by a kind of continued creation. Sensations are convenient
abstractions but nothing more. A sensation never presents itself in
the adult consciousness without a crowd of instantaneously evoked
relations. There is never absolute exclusion between perception and
sensation: these are two states which dissolve into each other, which
have no difference in nature, and which are separable only in gross.
Properly speaking there are no sensations, only perceptions more or less
complex. In sensation the state of mind is considered in itself without
reference to its relations; in perception attention is paid chiefly to
the relations. But sensation exists only for consciousness, as it can
never enter directly into intellectual constructions, but only through
the state of remembrance. Every sensation so far as we are sensible of
it is purely felt, and we effectuate our mental constructions not with
sensations, but with our remembrances of sensations. But the rôle of
sensation is still more restricted. However rapid its flight across
consciousness it instantaneously provokes the remembrance of numerous
sensations of differences and resemblances with anterior sensations. It
is an occasion for this, and nothing more. To be perceived, a sensation
must be followed by sensations different from itself. The mind seizes
relations of resemblance between sensations and resemblances between
relations: it classes them, the chaos unravels and organises itself.
The organisation has been progressive, but at all stages the procedure
is alike; it consists in disengaging remembrances more or less masked
by dissimilarities: this is the universal procedure of the mind and the
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