Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/397

 384 j. DEWEY : find out what is symbolised, we actually neglect utterly that which is the symbol, the psychical existence. What is per- ceived is, in short, significance, meaning. The amount of perception one has, whether as a babe or adult, as layman, or as chemist, is precisely the meaning that one finds signi- fied by one's sensations : the sensations, as such, may be pre- cisely alike in the four cases. Perceiving, to restate a psy- chological commonplace, is interpreting. The content of the perception is what is signified. Now, it is to be noted that the meaning constitutes for us the whole value of the experience. As a physiological fact, the occurrence of nerve tremors of some sort may be the important thing. But as a fact of human experience, the important thing is that the experience has significance. It means something to us. It reports something to our in- telligence. Absolute nonsense and nonentity are synony- mous as matters of conscious experience. It is true enough that without the idea as existence there would be no ex- perience ; the sensuous clustering is a condition sine qua non of all, even the highest spiritual, consciousness. But it is none the less true that if we could strip any psychical existence of all its qualities except bare existence, there would be nothing left, not even existence, for our intelligence. Even the fact that there is an experience, aside from lohat it is, is not the sensation itself ; it is the interpretation of the sensation. It is part of the meaning. If we take out of an experience all that it means, as distinguished from what it is a particular occurrence at a certain time, there is no psychical experience. The barest fragment of consciousness that can be hit upon has meaning as well as being. Take away the meaning, and consciousness vanishes. We may seem to be dwelling needlessly upon the veriest truism of psychology that its subject-matter is conscious experience, for that is all that is really meant when we say that significance constitutes the worth of an idea. But, perhaps because it is such a truism, there is no fact so often overlooked. The fundamental distinction between physical facts and psychical facts is not that the former exist in space, the latter in time, or any other specific distinction of mode of occurrence. It is that physical facts as such are facts of existence ; psychical facts are facts of meaning. Physical facts have meaning, but they have it as psychical, in relation to intelligence ; psychical facts have existence, but the existence does not constitute their express value in human experience. An idiot has as many ideas, quit exist- ences, as Shakespeare ; the delirious patient has, in all probability, more in a given time than his physician.