Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/206

 between a light-blue sense-figure and a dark-blue sense-figure. We can go further, and recognise colour and ignore the particular colour; and correspondingly there are recognisable sight-figures underlying figures of particular shades of particular colours.

62.5 But it would be a mistake to insist on the derivation of the generalised sense-figures from the recognition of generalised sense-objects. In general the converse process would seem to be nearer the truth. Namely, the analogy amid sense-figures is more insistently perceptible than the analogy amid sense-objects; and the derivation is as much from the generalised sense-figure to the generalised sense-object as in the converse order.

We must go further than this. Perceptive insistency is not ranged in the order of simplicity as determined by a reflective analysis of the elements of our awareness of nature. Sense-figures possess a higher perceptive insistency than the corresponding sense-objects. We first notice a dark-blue figure and pass to the dark-blueness.

62.6 Indeed the high perceptive power of figures is at once the foundation of our natural knowledge and the origin of our philosophical errors. It has led the theory of space to be annexed to objects and not to events, and thus created the fatal divorce between space and time. A figure, being an object, is not in space or time, except in a derivative sense.

This perceptive power of figures carries us to the direct recognition of sorts of objects which otherwise would remain in the region of abstract logical concepts. For example, our perception of sight-figures leads to the recognition of colour as being what is common to all particular colours.