A pure sensation we saw above, p. 7, to be an abstraction never realized in adult life. Any quality of a thing which affects our sense-organs does also more than that: it arouses processes in the hemispheres which are due to the organization of that organ by past experiences, and the result of which in consciousness are commonly described as ideas which the sensation suggests. The first of these ideas is that of the _thing_ to which the sensible quality belongs. _The consciousness of particular material things present to sense_ is nowadays called _perception_.[83] The consciousness of such things may be more or less complete; it may be of the mere name of the thing and its other essential attributes, or it may be of the thing's various remoter relations. It is impossible to draw any sharp line of distinction between the barer and the richer consciousness, because the moment we get beyond the first crude sensation all our consciousness is a matter of suggestion, and the various suggestions shade gradually into each other, being one and all products of the same psychological machinery of association. In the directer consciousness fewer, in the remoter more, associative processes are brought into play. _Perception thus differs from sensation by the consciousness of farther facts associated with the object of the sensation:_ "When I lift my eyes from the paper on which I am writing I see the chairs and tables and walls of my room, each of its proper shape and at its proper distance. I see, from my window, trees and meadows, and horses and oxen, and distant hills. I see each of its proper size, of its proper form, and at its proper distance; and these particulars appear as immediate informations of the eye, as the colors which I see by means of it. Yet philosophy has ascertained that we derive nothing from the eye whatever but sensations of color.... How, then, is it that we receive accurate information, by the eye, of size and shape and distance? By association merely. The colors upon a body are different, according to its figure, its shape, and its size. But the sensations of color and what we may here, for brevity, call the sensations of extension, of figure, of distance, have been so often united, felt in conjunction, that the sensation of the color is never experienced without raising the ideas of the extension, the figure, the distance, in such intimate union with it, that they not only cannot be separated, but are actually supposed to be seen. The sight, as it is called, of figure, or distance, appearing as it does a simple sensation, is in reality a complex state of consciousness--a sequence in which the antecedent, a sensation of color, and the consequent, a number of ideas, are so closely combined by association that they appear not one idea, but one sensation."