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Rh ceptual analysis. ‘Direct recognition’ is conscious recognition of a percept in a pure mode, devoid of symbolic reference.

Symbolic reference may be, in many respects, erroneous. By this I mean that some ‘direct recognition’ disagrees, in its report of the actual world, with the conscious recognition of the fused product resulting from symbolic reference. Thus error is primarily the product of symbolic reference, and not of conceptual analysis. Also symbolic reference itself is not primarily the outcome of conceptual analysis, though it is greatly promoted by it. For symbolic reference is still dominant in experience when such mental analysis is at a low ebb. We all know Aesop’s fable of the dog who dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water. We must not, however, judge too severely of error. In the initial stages of mental progress, error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom. Aesop’s dog lost his meat, but he gained a step on the road towards a free imagination.

Thus symbolic reference must be explained antecedently to conceptual analysis, although there is a strong interplay between the two whereby they promote each other.