Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/401

 388 j. DEWEY: of reasoning. There is no need at this time, I suppose, to do more than state the fact that every perception is a judg- ment based on an inference. It is indifferent to the sensa- tion whether it is interpreted as a cloud or as a mountain ; a danger-signal, or a signal of open passage. The auditory sensation remains unchanged whether it is interpreted as an evil spirit urging one to murder, or as intra-organic, due to disordered blood-pressure. The result is arrived at by a process of inference. It is not the sensation in and of itself that means this or that object ; it is the sensation as asso- ciated, composed, identified, or discriminated with other ex- periences ; the sensation, in short, as mediated. The whole worth of the sensation for intelligence is the meaning it has by virtue of its relation to the rest of experience. Since the rest of experience is not and cannot be present as so much immediate existence, we may well call the element which gives any psychical fact its value mediate. We have just been introduced to some terms which, indeed, it has long been difficult to keep in the background ; terms like 'identification,' ' discrimination,' 'relation'. For this mediate element is precisely what we mean by relation, and the processes by which it is got at, and read into the sensation, are those of association and comparison. It has long seemed to me a remarkable fact that the later writers of the specifically British school of psychology, led by Mr. Spencer, recognise this truth and yet do not think it necessary to revise their fundamental notions of intelligence. I can account for it only on the supposition that they do not attend to the double sense of the term ' idea '. Their general theory of intelligence, as at bottom sensational, requires that it be the sensations as existences which are compared and related. Their theory, as it actually works, is that the sensations in their intellectual quality, as signifi- cances, are compared and identified. Their theory as they employ it for purposes of explanation is in direct contra- diction to their theory in its fundamental presuppositions. If all intelligence is a product of psychical existences, called sensations, plus their association and comparison, no amount of association and comparison will ever give a result which has meaning for consciousness. Strictly speak- ing, it is impossible for such processes to occur. But if the comparison of sensations does result in significant ex- perience, there must be a certain intellectual quality in the sensations not due to their properties as bare existences. A relation of identity is not a sensuous skeleton which runs through psychical occurrences and ribs them together. It is identity of meaning; permanence, in short, of intelligence.