Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in my last lecture.
What, then, are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which the conceptual translation so fatally leaves out?
The dreamer thus approaches his own childhood, as he does likewise the childhood of the human race, by reaching back for the more primitive perceptual mode of thought.
As the dream is a perceptual representation it must put into perceptually comprehensible form everything that it wants to express, even that which is most abstract.
The tendency to vividly perceptual or plastic expression that is characteristic of the dream, corresponds accordingly to the Representability.
It reaches back also from the complicated and completed to a more primitive function, from abstract thought to perceptual images, from practical activity to hallucinatory wish fulfillment.
As contrasted with the ideational, the perceptual consciousness is concerned with practice.
Scientific formulas, on the contrary, cry aloud for retranslation into perceptual terms; they are like tight-ropes, on which a man may walk but on which he cannot stand still.
Everything audible thrills merely by sounding, and though this perceptual thrill be at first overpowered by the effort and excitement of action, yet it eventually fights its way to the top.
Dewey is alert to the dangers which result from subjectivism, but does not distinguish, as carefully as he might, between knowledge as inference, and knowledge as perceptual awareness.
The problem, then, is to give an account of the perceptual processes which shall eliminate the artificial states of mind and present mental operations as natural processes.
Perceptual space is that form of extension in which the physical universe is recognized to have been created and in which it now exists.
For every single point in perceptual space is a focus for lines drawn through every conceivable grade of materiality, spatiality or intellectuality in the kosmos.
Mental differences and potentialities in general may be due to the magnitude of the psychic fluxional or differential that exists between the conceptual and the perceptual universe.
There is absolutely neither perceptible nor imperceptible means by which perceptual space in anywise can be affected by an act of will, ideation or movement.
And as such has no logical right to be put in the same category as perceptual space.
Further, Kant maintains that these principles are demanded, not merely for the development of perceptual consciousness, but for its very existence.
III For simplicity's sake, I have written as if my main problem were to show how, in the face of a supposed difficulty, a strictly realistic theory of the perceptualevent may be maintained.
Thus, for practical purposes, many perceptual events are cases of knowledge; that is, they have been used as such so often that the habit of so using them is established or automatic.
Thus when the realist conceives the perceptual occurrence as an intrinsic case of knowledge or of presentation to a mind or knower, he lets the nose of the idealist camel into the tent.
But while it had inherited this view from the older rationalism, it had also learned from Hume, via Kant, that direct sense or perceptual material must be taken into account.
A particular or single event of perceptual awareness can be determined as to its ingredients and structure only in a continuum of objects.
His intellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart from the psychical activity of his emotions.
Knowledge is to be all of the perceptual type, where what is known is directly presented; and, in conformity with this principle, being is to be restricted to the content of the living pulses of experience.
The difference recognized in Plato and Aristotle between the divine spark and the appetitive and perceptual parts of human nature was now emphasized.
But, except for certain proofs of God and self, knowledge is entirely reduced to the perceptual type, to sensations, or ideas directly imparted to the mind by the objects themselves.
It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself.
The presence of one's fellows is in part the perceptual experience of their bodies.
Particular acts of perception are said directly to reveal not only perceptual objects, but perceiving subjects.
In both cases the perceptual absence of will is compensated for by the presence of some object associated with that will.
Perceptual and volitional activity has a sense for itself and also a sense for other like activity.
And it was the Count zu Castell and not the horse that found it necessary to invoke the aid of perceptual objects to bring his attention to the proper height of concentration.
B) Under the scientific treatment of the perceptual or formal factor in aesthetic experience we have many special problems, of which only a few can be touched on here.
Moreover, as a state of perceptual absorption in which one loses consciousness of the ordinary self and its world, it has a certain resemblance to the state of ecstasy and of the hypnotic trance.
It marks them off as the senses by the exercise of which perceptual enjoyment may most readily and certainly be increased through the resonant effects of sympathy.
For an interpretation of painting in terms of the perceptual process, cf.
I mean the apprehension of an idea when conveyed by some sensuous medium; the finding or recovery of some unity of thought in a perceptual context.
But in representing physical nature art does not, as science does, {206} formulate merely its geometrical or dynamical skeleton; to do so would be contrary to the intent of art to represent things in their perceptual concreteness.
This means understanding other persons or objects on theperceptual basis.
Memory images are usually much simplified reproductions of the perceptual facts.
In its more complex forms it presupposes trains of ideas; but in its essential features it is present and operative at the perceptual level.
The visual memory image was thus aroused by a direct perceptual appeal to the eye.
Still, it is clear that such an act would be the perceptual precursor of the deliberate conduct of the rational being by whom the sign is definitely realized as a sign, the intentional meaning of which is distinctly present to thought.
In short, qualitative transformation of facts (data of perception), not their mechanical subtraction and recombination, is the difference between scientific and perceptual knowledge.
III In the above discussion, I have unavoidably anticipated the second problem: the relation of conceptual thought toperceptual data.
Knowledge, perceptual and conceptual, of a hunting dog is prerequisite in order that I may really hunt with the hounds.
Thus we become able, as it were, to calculate in concepts in a way and to an extent that would be quite impossible in the merelyperceptual medium of recepts.
First he points out that man, much more than any other animal, uses the sense of sight for the purposes of perceptual life.
Classification there doubtless is in both cases; but the one order is due to the closeness of resemblances in an act of perception, while in the other order it is an expression of their remoteness from merely perceptual associations.
In other words, the kind of classification with which recepts are concerned is that which lies nearest to the kind of classification with which all processes of so called perceptual inference depend—such as mistaking a bowl for a sphere.
The nirvikalpa stage is thus a logical stage in the development of perceptual cognition and not a psychological stage.
That right knowledge which is generated directly by the contact of the senses with the object is said to be the product of the perceptual process.
We can only be certain that knowledge has been produced by the perceptual act, but there is nothing in this knowledge or its revelation of its object from which we can infer that the perception is also objectively valid or true.
Allusion is also made in this connection to the special perceptual powers of the yogins (sages attaining mystical powers through Yoga practices).
Ratnakîrtti wishes to draw attention to the fact that as one perceptual moment reveals a number of objects, so one causal moment may produce a number of effects.
They cannot thus modify the sense-knowledge which rises in the soul by inward determination; for it is already existent in it; the perceptual process only means that the veil which as observing it is removed.
Whatever may be the successive intermediary processes, if the knowledge is a result of sense-contact and if it appertains to the object with which the sense is in contact, we should regard it as a result of the perceptual process.
Homogeneous representations (the memory image and the perceptual image of a black poodle) fuse into a single representation.
In the merely perceptual stage, the mind gains only a confused and mutilated idea of external objects, of the body, and of itself; it is unable to separate that in the perception (e.
But the distant parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us, and form conceptual objects merely, into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare.
Footnote: This is meant merely to exclude reality of an 'unknowable' sort, of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms can be given.
An experience, perceptualor conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true.
By 'reality' humanism means nothing more than the other conceptual or perceptual experiences with which a given present experience may find itself in point of fact mixed up.
But we cannot positively imagine today what the different hypothesis could have been, for the category of trans-perceptual reality is now one of the foundations of our life.
Without abstract concepts to handle our perceptual particulars by, we are like men hopping on one foot.
Those opponents of the Eleatean unmoved Unity were induced to make light of such an argument by prejudices of a perceptual character.
But, as we have already seen, even with us these emotions have to be particularized and brought within the perceptual sphere ere they are strongly operative on conduct.
In the normal life of animals the attention is of the perceptual order; it is a direct stimulation of the faculties through a perceptualpresentation of sense or representation in memory which gives rise to an appetence or aversion.
Moreover, the same result may, in different cases, be reached by perceptual or by conceptual inference.
Remembering this, let us see what can be said in favour of a perceptual sense of injustice, guilt, the ludicrous, and the beautiful.
No doubt it is out of this perceptualprominence of one characteristic and vagueness of its accompaniments that conceptual isolation of this one characteristic has grown, as I believe, through the naming of predominants.
In speaking of the faculty of attention in animals, it may be well to note that attention is of two kinds--perceptual or direct, and conceptual or indirect.
In the case of some instincts, originating by the natural selection of unintelligent activities, the perceptual element may never have emerged, and the initiation may have been a mere sense-stimulus.
It will be remembered that a distinction was drawn between perceptual inferences and inferences involving a conceptual element.
I do not for one moment deny that in animals are to be found the perceptual germs of even the higher emotional states.
The distinction is no doubt from many points of view important, but we must not speak of 'conceptual space' and 'perceptual space' as if they had nothing to do with one another.
Thus perceptual space, under its triple form, visual, tactile and motor, is essentially different from geometric space.
So-called correct perception is connected with a long-continued process ofperceptual education motived and initiated from within.
Our representations are only the reproduction of our sensations; they can therefore be ranged only in the same frame as these, that is to say, in perceptual space.
Compare it now to the frame of our representations and our sensations, which I may call perceptual space.
Perceptual space is only an image of geometric space, an image altered in shape by a sort of perspective, and we can represent to ourselves objects only by bringing them under the laws of this perspective.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "perceptual" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
