Page:Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect.pdf/27

Rh This so-called ‘wall,’ disclosed in the pure made of presentational immediacy, contributes itself to our experience only under the guise of spatial extension, combined with spatial perspective, and combined with sense-data which in this example reduce to colour alone.

I say that the wall contributes itself under this guise, in preference to saying that it contributes these universal characters in combination. For the characters are combined by their exposition of one thing in a common world including ourselves, that one thing which I call the ‘wall.’ Our perception is not confined to universal characters; we do not perceive disembodied colour or disembodied extensiveness: we perceive the wall’s colour and extensiveness. The experienced fact is ‘colour away on the wall for us.’ Thus the colour and the spatial perspective are abstract elements, characterizing the concrete way in which the wall enters into our experience. They are therefore relational elements between the ‘percipient at that moment,’ and that other equally actual entity, or set of entities, which we call the ‘wall at that moment.’ But the mere colour and the mere spatial perspective are very abstract entities, because they are only arrived at by discarding the concrete relation-