Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/147

 volumes followed in 1828 (London). A third and enlarged edition in five volumes octavo appeared in 1848–1849, and a fourth in four in 1854 (London). In 1875–1879 Dr Minors Bright published a still fuller edition in six volumes octavo (London). Many portraits of Pepys are known to have been taken and several can be traced. One was taken by Savill (1661), another by John Hales (1666), now in the National Portrait Gallery. A portrait by Sir Peter Lely is in the Pepysian library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. Three portraits were taken by Sir Godfrey Kneller, of which one belongs to the Royal Society, and another is in the Hall of Magdalene. Pepys's only known publication in his life was the Memoirs of the Navy, but other writings have been attributed to him.

 PEQUOT, an Algonquian tribe of North-American Indians, a branch of the Mohicans. They occupied the coast of Connecticut from Niantic river to the Rhode Island boundary. Together with their kinsmen, the Mohegans, they formed a powerful and warlike People, bitterly hostile to the early settlers. In 1637 the Pequots were surprised by the whites at their fort on the Mystic river, and suffered so completely a defeat that the tribe was broken up, and its remnants took refuge with neighbouring tribes. The Pequot country passed under the control of the Mohegans. At the height of their power the Pequots numbered, it is estimated, some 3000.

PERCEPTION (from Lat. percipere, to perceive), in psychology, the term specially applied to the mental process by which the mind becomes conscious of an external object; it is the mental completion of a sensation, which would otherwise have nothing but a momentary existence coextensive with the duration of the stimulus, and is intermediate between sensation and the “ ideal revival, ” which can reinstate a perceptual consciousness when the object is no longer present. This narrow and precise usage of the term “ perception ” is due to Thomas Reid, whose view has been generally adopted in principle by modern psychologists. On the other hand some psychologists decline to accept the view that the three processes are delimited by sharp lines of cleavage. It is held on the one hand that sensation is in fact impossible as a purely subjective state without cognition; on the other that sensation and perception differ only in degree, perception being the more complex. The former view admits, which the latter practically denies, the distinction in principle. Among those who adopt the second view are E. B. Titchener and William ]ames James (Principles of Psychology, ii. 76) compares sensation and perception as “the barer and the richer consciousness,” and says that “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.” Similarly Wundt and Titchener incline to obliterate the distinction between perception and ideal revival. Prior to Reid, the word perception had a long history in the wider sense of cognition in general. Locke and Hume both use it in this sense, and regard thinking as that special kind of perception which implies deliberate attention. (See )

PERCEVAL, or (Ger. Parzival, Fr. Perlesvaus, Welsh, Peredur), the hero of a comparatively small, but highly important, group of romances, forming part of the Arthurian cycle. Originally, the story of Perceval was of the character of a folk-tale, and that one of remarkable importance and world-wide diffusion. He is represented as the son of a widow, “la dame veuve,” his father having been slain in tourney, battle or by treachery, either immediately before, or shortly after his birth. The mother, fearful lest her son should share his father's fate, flies to the woods, either alone with one attendant, or with a small body of faithful retainers, and there brings up her son in ignorance of his name, his parentage and all knightly accomplishments. The youth grows up strong, swift-footed and of great personal beauty, but, naturally enough, of very limited intelligence. This last is one of the most characteristic traits of the Perceval story, connecting it alike with the Irish Lay of the Great Fool, and the Teutonic Dummling tales. He spends his days chasing the beasts of the forest, running them down by sheer speed, or killing them with darts (javelots) or bow and arrows, the only weapons he knows.

One day, however, he meets a party of knights in armour; he first adores the leader as God, and then takes them to be some new and wondrous kind of animal, asking the most naive questions as to their armour and equipment. Being told that they are knights he determines that he too will be one, and returns to his mother announcing his intention of at once setting forth into the world to seek for knighthood. Dressed as a peasant (or a fool), he departs (his mother, in some versions, dying of grief), and comes to the king's court. Of course in the romance it is the court of Arthur; probably in the original tale it was simply “the king.” Here his uncouth behaviour and great personal beauty attract general attention, and he is alike mocked by Kay, and his future distinction mysteriously foretold. He slays a foe of Arthur's, the Red Knight, who has insulted the king, and challenged the knights of the court, who, for some mysterious reason, are unable to respond to the challenge. Dressing himself in the armour of the slain knight, which he has great difficulty in handling and eventually puts on over his peasant's garb, he sets out on a series of adventures which differ greatly in the various versions, but the outcome of which is that he becomes a skilful and valiant knight and regains the heritage of his father.

This, the Perceval story proper, has been recognized by scholars as a variant of a widespread folk-tale theme, designated by J. C. von Hahn as the Aryan Expulsion and Return formula, which counts among its representatives such heroes as Perseus, Cyrus, Romulus and Remus, Siegfried, and, as Alfred Nutt has pointed out, Arthur himself. This particular variant appears to be of British-Celtic origin, and the most faithful representative of the original tale is now very generally held to be the English Syr Percyvelle of Galles, a poem preserved in the Thornton manuscript. Here the hero is nephew to Arthur on the mother's side, and his father, of the same name as himself, is a valiant knight of the court. A noticeable feature of the story is the uncertainty as to the hero's parentage; the mother is always a lady of rank, a queen in her own right, or sister of kings (as a rule of the Grail kings); but the father's rank varies, he is never a king, more often merely a valiant knight, and in no instance does he appear to be of equal rank with his wife. This distinguishes the story from that of Lancelot, with which some modern scholars have been inclined to identify it; for Lancelot's parentage is never in doubt, he is fis du roi.

The connexion of the story with Arthur and his court brought about a speedy and more important development, the precise steps of which are not yet clear: Perceval became the hero of the Grail quest, in this ousting Gawain, to whom the adventure originally belonged, and the Perceval became merged in the Grail tradition. Of the Perceval-Grail romances the oldest from the point of view of manuscript preservation is the Perceval or Conte del Graal of Chrétien de Troyes. Two manuscripts, indeed, the British Museum and Mons texts, preserve a fragment relating the birth and infancy of the hero, which appears to represent the source at the root alike of Chrétien and of the German Parzival, but it is only a fragment, and so far no more of the poem has been discovered. Chrétien left his poem unfinished, and we do not know how he intended to complete the adventures of his hero; but those writers who undertook the task, Wauchier de Denain, Gerbert de Montreuil and Manessier, carried it out with such variety of detail, and such a bewildering indifference to Chrétien's version, that it seems practically certain that there must have been, previous to Chrétien's work, more than one poem dealing with the same theme. The German poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose Parzival in parts closely agrees with the Perceval and who was long held to be a mere translator of Chrétien,