Visible or sensible presentation; appearance; a sensible percept received by the imagination; an image.
The modern discussion between percept and concept, the one sensuous, the other intellectual.
That percept was what I MEANT, for into it my idea has passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness and fulfilled intention.
My idea of this pen verifies itself through my percept; and my percept is held to BE the pen for the time being-- percepts and physical realities being treated by common sense as identical.
To recur to the Memorial Hall example lately used, it is only when our idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the percept that we know 'for certain' that from the beginning it was truly cognitive of THAT.
What I am for you is in the first instance a percept of your own.
A law by which my percept shall change yours directly is no more mysterious than a law by which it shall first change a physical reality, and then the reality change yours.
The formation of a percept consists of three gradual stages, viz.
The plain distinction between a sensation and a percept may be fixed in the mind by remembering the following: A sensation is a feeling; a percept is a simple thought identifying one or more sensations.
A sensation is merely the conscious recognition of an excitation of a nerve end; a percept results from a distinct mental process regarding the sensation.
A percept arises from the perception of a sensation; a concept is a purely mental, abstract creation, whose only existence is in the world of ideas and which has no corresponding individual object in the world of sense.
The ethical percept is something that can be understood only in terms of itself.
Further, it is well to observe here again how distinctly peculiar is this percept of obligation among the data of our cognitive faculties.
This was determined by comparison between the image and the percept immediately on opening the eyes and seeing the object at the end of the five minutes occupied by the experiment.
Frequent comparison of the image with the percept was made at the close of experiments and showed the utmost diversity in size, vividness and distinctness.
A similar mode of comparison showed that, in about half of the experiments, the images were at the end of five minutes approximately equal to the percept in clearness and distinctness of outline.
A percept which is coalesced with another cannot reproduce all others qualitatively different from it for the simple reason that the latter are in like manner coalesced with one another.
In this process are successively recalled to consciousness all the percepts which were connected with the percept that was lost, and with them, finally, that, too, is brought to light.
It would not, I conceive, answer it even if it were able to make out that the whole mental content in the perceptcan be traced back to elementary sensations and their combinations.
And, on the other hand, he looks on a false or illusory percept as arising in another way not involving, as its condition, the pre-existence of a corresponding material body or physical agent.
The interpretative image which is to transform the impression into a percept is now being formed by a mere process of suggestion.
From this it would appear to follow that, so far as a percept is representative, recollection must be re-representative.
To recall an object to the mind is to reconstruct the percept in the absence of a sense-impression.
We may thus roughly define an illusion of perception as consisting in the formation of a quasi-percept which is peculiar to an individual, or which is contradicted by another and presumably more accurate percept.
But by common consent, a percept implies a presentative apprehension of an object now present to sense.
I would contend, then, that the psychologist, in tracing the genesis of the percept out of previous mental experiences, no more settles the question, What is the object of perception?
In other words, the percept arises through a fusion of an actual sensation with mental representations or "images" of sensation.
Consider, for example, your percept of an automobile flashing past your windows.
You look at a watch which I hold before your eyes and secure a percept of it.
The percept that contained only sensory material, and lacked all memory elements, ideas and meanings, would be no perceptat all.
The dependence of the percept on material from past experience is also illustrated in the common statement that what one gets from an art exhibit or a concert depends on what he brings to it.
An image is thus an approximate copy of a formerpercept (or several percepts).
And besides this fact, it would be inconvenient to have to go and secure afresh each sensation orpercept every time we need to use it in our thought.
Stated differently, certain objects and situations come to suggest certain characteristic acts or responses so strongly that the action follows immediately on the heels of the percept of the object, or the idea of the act.
Is the attitude of the mind towards the objectively real one of discrimination a priori as to the direction or dimension in which a percept may originate?
But really the foundation for such a disappointment is present in every concept, every percept with which the mind deals.
For there is quite as much difference between the sensuous percept and the real thing itself as between an object and its shadow.
From the above we may see the fundamental differences between a Percept and a Concept.
The Percept is the mental image of a real object--a particular thing.
A Percept is the product of Perception, or in other words, our idea gained through Perception.
The movement from signs and miracles is a movement from the outward to the inward, from percept to spirituality; and the essence of religion, as a reality in itself and as an experience of the soul, is to be found by taking such a step.
If the world were less than this, if the percept could not somehow become a concept, all progress would come to a standstill, and we should be no more than creatures of sensations and percepts which vanished as soon as they appeared.
And the presence of such a life enables the percept to turn into a concept.
In addition, then, to the terms Percept and Concept, I coin the word Recept.
These different associates usually give to the percept a vividness and material reality which the other two lack.
The first type of confusion, between percept and image, has been recently made the subject of investigation.
Knowing the unreliability of the object image, it would seem very unsafe to use it as the link between percept and symbol.
Most of the recent writers, however, agree that the stimulus for aesthetic appreciation must be a sense percept or an image of some sense object.
To say, therefore, that to gain a concept he compares the qualities found in several individual things is not strictly true, for if his first percept becomes a type by which he interprets other dogs, his first experience is already a concept.
Describing the premises of an inductive process as particular truths, and the conclusion as a universal truth, however, involves the same fiction as was noted in separating the percept and the concept into two distinct types of notions.
Whenever he passes to the perception of another dog, he undoubtedly interprets this with the general ideas already obtained from this earlier percept of a dog.
But the objection here is that if our percept is only similar to the external object then this similarity is a thing which is different from the presentation, and thus perception becomes invalid.
The flow of knowledge creates both thepercept and the perceiver and unites them.
When once the names are connected with the percept it forms the determinate perception of a thing called savikalpa-pratyak.sa.
The perception of the class (jâti) of a percept in relation to other things may thus be regarded in the main as a difference between determinate and indeterminate perceptions.
Thus the percept first comes; the percept grows into the concept; the concept into the judgment; the judgment into reasoning; and these are the four steps in the process of knowing.
A single fact reaching consciousness through the senses and recognized in consciousness is called a percept or a particular notion.
We have already observed that a percept seldom gives an impartial compound of the objects of which it is the generic image.
Those, therefore, which are agreeable are chiefly dwelt upon by the lover of beauty, and his percept will give an average of things with a great emphasis laid on that part of them which is beautiful.
As we reflect and seek to correct this inadequacy, the percept changes on our hands.
We might say that the percept is the mind's immediate image of a thing or quality, and the concept is the result of the storing up and grouping and recombining of percepts.
For it does not depend at all on what the percepts contain, but solely on the fact that the soul puts forth all its powers in order not to have anything in the consciousness except the one percept in question.
One gains a comprehension of this immersion or sinking down into a percept by calling the Memory-Concept before the soul.
