Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/240

224 consciousness — probably those which give the assimilating elements to an impression of sense. Next to sensuous cognition comes immediate recognition, which may or may not be attended with representations of accompanying circumstances: the latter form shades off into mediate recognition when the accompanying circumstances connect impression with recognition. As an idea may be apperceived after its appearance in consciousness, it may be that associated ideas, apprehended after recognition takes place, mediate between impression and recognition. It may also happen that the auxiliary ideas, after bringing about a recognition, disappear before they rise to apperception. Mediate and immediate recognition, with or without associated ideas, would thus be reduced to one form. The peculiar feeling which accompanies recognition is in evidence of this view. Similar to the feelings of cognition, though more intense, feelings of recognition are aroused by contact associations. If recognition only took place when one idea called up another similar to it, recognition would amount to assimilation. Of the presence of the auxiliary ideas, producing the feeling of recognition, there can be in cases of mediate recognition no doubt. From experiments with instantaneous impressions we may infer that in cases of immediate recognition without attendant ideas, we are still darkly conscious of the latter: the alternative hypothesis, that the feeling is due to ideas below the threshold of consciousness, would lead to the assumption that ideas which have disappeared from consciousness retain the properties of ideas present in consciousness. Sensuous recognition is the connecting link between simultaneous and successive associations: it differs from the latter in that the acts of ideation do not follow one another, but happen together. This simply means that some of the parts of an associated whole take more time to rise to apperception than others: if the principal part of an idea is first assimilated, while the secondary ideas arise later, we have a case of association by contiguity; but if out of an indefinite number of assimilating ideas, one alone is apperceived, we have association by similarity. One outcome of the reduction of cognition, recognition, and association to the same fundamental processes is, that every idea which is not aroused by impressions from without, rests on associative influences. In cases of the emergence of seemingly unconnected ideas, it can be experimentally shown that the connecting link is present though not perceived. Consequently we can lay down the proposition that all changes of ideas, not arising through direct impressions of sense, rest on association; that is, on the unbroken complication in which are connected together all tendencies towards revival of ideas once experienced and still accessible to consciousness.