Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/406

 KNOWLED&E AS IDEALISATION. 393 minimum of intelligent or ideal quality to read into sensa- tions, these sensations would never get significance, or presence in conscious experience. The mind must possess at the very outset the idea that there is meaning there. It must project into sensations the conception that they are significant, even if it does not develop the measure of this significance. A mind which does not come to sensations with an ineradicable pre-judgment that the sensations are interpretable, that is, possible bearers of an ideal quality, does not have the starting-point for any interpretation, and its sensation could not ever get a beginning on the road of meaning. The sensations might conceivably revive each other and fuse with each other indefinitely, but meaning is absent until they symbolise each other; and they fail to symbolise each other until the meaning of one is represented by another. But, after all, the conception of the recalling and fusing of sensations is not one to be allowed, except upon the supposition of the interpreting activity of intelli- gence. The very fact that sensations are so connected that the peripheral stimulation of one kind will set up the central stimulation of another is due to the unification of meaning which has some time made them fractional members of one whole, so that one cannot recur, even as existence, without the other. Attention has at some time laid its delaying hand upon them and conjoined them ; it has selected them for and excluded others from its connecting grasp ; and this is to say that they have been given a unity in that which they symbolise. Sensations cannot revive each other except as members of one whole of meaning ; and even if they could, we should have no beginning of significant experience. Significance, meaning, must be already there. Intelligence, in short, is the one indispensable condition of intelligent ex- perience. This seen and stated, it becomes a question of simple fact how far developed in any case the necessary intelligence may be. For our general considerations, it is enough that the minimum requirement of an intelligence which recognises that its sensations have meaning be met ; whether any defi- nite meanings, and, if so, what, are projected into sensations, is at present a matter of indifference. We do not care whether they are interpreted as in space and time ; as pos- sessing necessarily quantity, quality, relation and modality or not. It is enough to know that they become experience only as interpreting intelligence projects into them some- thing of its own being ; they are what they are through this relation to intelligence. There is therefore no beginning of intelligent experience, except such as involves intelligence.