Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/404

 KNOWLEDGE AS IDEALISATION. 391 although in the stage of perception we are not conscious of this relation. Self-consciousness, again, is simply the con- scious recognition that the ideal element is involved in all knowledge together with what is implied in this statement. Self-consciousness is the idealising process of all knowledge continued till it becomes conscious of itself. But these are aspects of the question that must now be deferred. We have to ask what is the especial ground for calling the element which makes knowledge significant an ideal element ? The answer in general is that this factor is ideal, because it is not present by way of immediate psychical occurrence, but as meaning. It is significance ; and this is significance, presence as symbolised. It is convenient to have a term to denote what is present in the way of meaning rather than in the way of existence, and the term ' ideal ' just meets the demand. It meets it negatively in suggesting that this factor is not one of space- and time-existence and occurrence ; it meets it positively in suggesting that it is due to intelligence. This is the point which |has now to be shown, and shown not through an examination of the logical conditions of experience, but through a psychological inquiry into its facts. Whence come the ideal elements which give to experience its meaning ? By what process do we interpret sensations so that they become significant to us of objects and events in space and time ? These questions are simply the funda- mental questions of psychology, and can be answered only by a complete treatise on psychology. Nothing but very general considerations may be expected of me here. The answer which is ordinarily given to the question, the one we have just seen given, is undoubtedly the correct answer. Sensations get meaning by being interpreted through their relations to the rest of experience ; through the processes of identification and discrimination. But the sensation is not identified with nor discriminated from another sensation. This would add no whit to its signifi- cance, besides being a process psychologically impossible. Previous sensations, as existences, are gone for ever ; gone as much as the time in which they occurred. It is true, doubtless, that they have left organic traces of their occur- rence in the brain ; it may be true that these organic traces may, by indirect stimulation, re-awaken sensations like to the previous ones. But in this process there is, as such, no aid. There is so much sensuous material indirectly stimu- lated added to the sensuous material directly stimulated, and that is all. If sensations before were multiple, chaotic,