Boris Sidis

“ In the process of recognition it is not the motor accompaniment, it is the feeling of sameness of experience, the feeling of pastness with its localization in a series of "settings" or of systems that go to form the main elements.
I must say that the motor accompaniments have been too much overworked in our psychological theories. We have carried over into our philosophy, such as pragmatism, and into our psychology of recent years too much of the haste and whirl of the exchange and the shop. Everything is motor and everything is practical. ”

“ Often we succeed in forming a complete association with the past, we localize the given familiar experience, and then complete recognition ensues. Familiarity is incomplete, vague, indefinite recognition. ”

“ Just such a tingling and trembling of unrecovered associates is the penumbra of recognition that may surround any experience and make it seem familiar, though we know not why." In other words, imperfect, diffused recognition with no special system, or setting to come in live contact with and be localized in a mental series of an individual moment consciousness fails to give that mental synthesis which is the essential characteristic of the fully developed moment-consciousness. Recognition of an experience lived through in the past is the basis of what is known as the sense of familiarity. ”

“ All ordinary experiences which have been recognized over and over again, all sorts and conditions of mental life, under different and opposite tendencies, feelings and emotions, under various settings and conflicting systems cease to be surrounded by a nimbus of pastness and become cognitive in character. When too often repeated the experience becomes so much worn by use, if we may use such an expression, that it can no longer be reproduced voluntarily in consciousness. ”

“ In the lower forms of recognition where the self is not present, as in the higher vertebrates and possibly in infants, there exists the present cognition of the experience and the re-cognition of it in the shape of a vague memory that it had been experienced before. ”

“ Thus a strange face seen a few times or only once can be clearly represented, but the faces of familiar people with whom we are in constant intercourse can no longer be clearly reproduced and represented. ”

“ Though on hearing the voice of some unseen person slightly known to us, we say we recollect to whom the voice belongs, we do not use the same expression respecting the voices of those with whom we live. The meanings of words which in childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult life to be immediately present.
James then goes on saying: "These are the cases where too many paths, leading to too diverse associates, block each other's way, and all that the mind gets along with its object is a fringe of felt familiarity or sense that there are associates. ”

“ When an experience enters into a number of systems, or as James would put it into a number of "settings," then the special character of the "setting" becomes confused or even obliterated. The experience present calls forth so many different systems or "settings" that the recognition element lapses and reverts to the psychic state characteristic of the lower forms of moment consciousness, passing through the more elementary forms of recognition to cognition. ”

“ Some psychologists attempt to find the origin of recognition in the feeling of familiarity. Familiarity, however, is not a primary state out of which recognition develops, but on the contrary recognition is the primary state and familiarity is derivative only. ”

“ If we grant Bergson that such pure unadulterated memories are present, memories free from all motor reactions, then we must necessarily agree to the fact that remembrance, recollection, and hence recognition can exist without any motor accompaniments. In other words, recognition cannot be resolved into action, into motor accompaniments, into behavior and reactions. ”

“ That nascent cerebral excitation can affect consciousness with a sort of sense of the imminence of that which stronger excitations would make us definitely feel is obvious from what happens when we seek to remember a name. ”

“ A representative element is neither of the nature of the primary nor of the secondary sensory elements, it differs from both in the character of its psychic "stuff." The difference consists in the fact that a representative element is not cognitive, but recognitive. ”

“ As far as the cognitive aspect is concerned the chief characteristic of the synthetic and desultory moments, having sensory elements only as their content, is the direct reference to the object, to the relations of the external environment, while the characteristic feature of the moment, having mainly representative elements as its constituent, is the indirect reference to external relations. ”

“ Perhaps it expresses well the tendency of the modern philosophical and psychological trend of transmuting every thing into motion when psychologists describe themselves as being "motor men on the psychological car."
Recognition is not motion at least from a psychological standpoint, unless like Bergson we resort to the metaphysical, pan-psychistic argument of reducing motion to independent objective images as constituting the nature of external reality. ”