these concretions would never have been made or thought to be permanent, did they not express observed variations and recurrences in the sensible qualities immediately perceived and already recognised in their recurrence. These are themselves the true particulars. They are the first objects discriminated in attention and projected against the background of consciousness.
The immediate continuum may be traversed and mapped by two different methods. The prior one, because it is so very primitive and rudimentary, and so much a condition of all mental discourse, is usually ignored in psychology. The secondary method, by which external things are discovered, has received more attention. The latter consists in the fact that when several disparate sensations, having become recognisable in their repetitions, are observed to come and go together, or in fixed relation to some voluntary operation on the observer’s part, they may be associated by contiguity and merged in one portion of perceived space. Those having, like sensations of touch and sight, an essentially spatial character, may easily be superposed; the surface I see and that I touch may be identified by being presented together and being found to undergo simultaneous variations and to maintain common relations to other perceptions. Thus I may come to attribute to a single object, the term of an intellectual synthesis and ideal intention, my experiences through all the senses within a certain field of association, defined by its
