The next point to emphasise is that the process of perception is ' immensely furthered by the circumstance -that in ourselves it takes place in a mind which by dint of long and repeated prac tice has come to perform such acts of discriminating habitually and by aid of the facility of retention or revival. What, however, is it that is "revived" or "reproduced"? Not the "content ap prehended," for it obviously cannot be preserved after the act through which it has its being has ceased to exist. That content cannot persist in and for itself, because it is not an entity and it cannot persist in the mind, because, in the strict sense, it has never been "in" the mind. But the contents of our own cognitive acts, the awarenesses which we live through (erleben) are the mind's own property, or rather go to constitute its very structure, and these we are bound to recognise it has the power, in some form, of retaining and reviving. And in mature percep tion, a vast amount of what we appear to be immediately discern ing is not, as a matter of fact, immediately discerned, it is dis cerned through the aid of the revival of previous awareness of similar objects.
Thus, our apprehension of things tends, as the mental life de velops, to become, in one sense, less and less direct. The con tents of what we call our knowledge come gradually to assume the form of an inward possession, constituting as it were an in strument wherewith we proceed further to differentiate the fea tures of the world to be known. So that in the case of a familiar object, we do not require on each occasion to discriminate afresh its manifold features ; it is enough that we discriminate at the moment relatively few of them ; these immediately suggest the awareness of features previously discriminated, and the object is apprehended with a rapidity and ease that would otherwise have been impossible.
When, however, we proceed to what are called the "images" of memory and imagination there would seem, at first sight, to be more ground for assuming that these apprehended contents are existents. Yet here, again, it is extremely doubtful whether we are forced to assume that they are. For it is at least arguable that the process of imagining is of one piece with that of per ceiving, the chief difference being that in the former a relatively larger proportion of revived factors are involved. It is quite pos sible, namely, that in imagination where objective imagery is present, where a so-called "image" appears to stand over against the conscious subject as an object, there is, in fact, as in percep tion, a physical object upon which the act of discriminating is directed, and that this accounts for the objective character which the content apprehended seems to possess, although the number of the features actually discriminated is far less than in perception, and the portion of the apprehended content ascribable to revived awareness considerably greater and more arbitrary and haphazard. It will be necessary, no doubt, to recognise that bodily factors, and not only extra-organic things, may and do, in these circum stances, function as objects.
Finally, when we pass to thought, in the more specific sense of the term, to the apprehension of universals as such, to vimats or Pas as Aristotle termed it, there is no break in the course of development. It is only in virtue of the mind being able to revive the awareness of previously perceived contents, to compare these, and to free them from the accidental concomitants with which they were originally presented, that any generalisation on its part is possible. And any distinction recognised by the conscious sub ject involves the initial step of the liberation just referred to. For it is only by a process of comparing different contents that we are able to recognise resemblances or differences as such, and every resemblance or difference thus recognised is, by the very fact of its being a resemblance or difference, general in character.
The act of thought is, then, similar in character to the act of perceiving or of imagining. It, likewise, is essentially an act of discriminating, of comparing, and of relating. Moreover, here, too a distinction similar in nature to that already noted in the case of perceiving and imagining calls for acknowledgment. It is essential, namely, to distinguish the act of cognising a universal both from the universal itself and from the way in which that universal, in and through the act in question, is cognised. A mental state of conceiving is clearly a concrete event, which, although characterised by a plurality of properties possessed by it in common with other mental states, is in itself as definitely particular as any one of them. A concept, the content appre hended, is a way in which a universal is conceived, a mode in which it is apprehended by thought, and is obviously not to be confounded with the act through and by means of which it has been attained.
And, once more, although it is usual to identify concepts and the universals to which they refer, the identification is illegiti mate. A concept is a product of thought, reached by a process that is at once analytic and synthetic a process, on the one ha,rid, of singling out what is imbedded in a matrix of reality, and, on the other hand, of bringing together what is presented in numerical difference. The universal to which it refers is, or may be, a quality characterising a number of particulars, often widely removed from one another in time and space,—a "perva sive character of things." Furthermore, in thinking there is in variably a reference to the objective order of things as contrasted with the merely subjective play of the inner life. Yet this, again, is no new feature, but the natural development from the estab lishment in consciousness of the distinction between subjective activity and objective reality. In judgments of perception the act of thinking is directed upon an actually present object, and in the higher stages signs and symbols probably play a part not wholly dissimilar to that played by the nucleus of perceived fact in the case of imagination.