Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/408

 KNOWLEDGE AS IDEALISATION. 395 It is the sensations, however, with the ideal content given them by the self, which are meaning. The self does not work with a priori forms upon an a posteriori material, but intelligence as ideal (or a priori] constitutes experience (or the a posteriori) as having meaning. But I must return from this digression. Experience begins when intelligence projects something of itself into sensations. We have now to recognise that experience grows, or gets more meaning, just in the degree in which intelligence reads more ideal content into it. The adult has more experience than the child the Englishman than the Bushman because he has more ideas in his intellect to bring to bear upon his sensations and thus make them significant. Were the theory of our recent writers of the Empirical School correct, the difference must be (1) that the English adult has his formal capacity of relating more sharpened, and (2) that he has a greater number of revived sensations which he combines with his present. But it ought to be evident by this time that (to take the latter point first) the addition of revived sensations would in itself make the experience more confused, make it less significant. It is the addition of sensations selected because they possess the same meaning, it is their unification with the present as same content to intelligence, it is their discrimination as suggesting here and there a new and different shade of meaning, it is, in short, the supplying of meaning through sensations, and not of sensations, that makes the experience more significant. And this is to say that experience grows as intelligence adds out of its own ideal content ideal quality. So we may see (to take up the other point) that any amount of sharpening of the mere power of identification and discrimination, of comparison as a formal power, would add no whit to the experience. The experience as an existence, as a clustering of sensations, is already there. The sole thing is to find out what it means, and this can be done only as there is supplied the mediate relational ideal factor. The growth of the power of comparison implies not a formal growth, but a synthetic internal growth. It implies that when the mind is stimulated to an act of comparison, it has a more varied, complex, better organised system of ideas or meanings to bring to bear upon its sensations, and thus to transfer to these its own content of significance. This transference evidently incorporates the given ex- perience into the system of meanings or of intelligence, and thereby the better prepares the latter for future apperceptive acts ; its incorporation adds to the synthetic content of