Precognition

“ 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. ”

“ Probably ‘sense-recognition’ would be a better term for what I mean by ‘recognition.’ I have chosen the simpler term because I think that I shall be able to avoid the use of ‘recognition’ in any other meaning than that of ‘sense-recognition.’ I am quite willing to believe that recognition, in my sense of the term, is merely an ideal limit, and that there is in fact no recognition without intellectual accompaniments of comparison and judgment. But recognition is that relation of the mind to nature which provides the material for the intellectual activity. ”

“ The representative elements entering into the idea or image of an object change from reproduction to reproduction but they always mirror, refer to the same sensory elements and compounds; they recognize their object.
The recognition of an object or an event, however vague, means some experience that has been lived through before. In other words, the representation, although experienced, as a present psychic element, must have a glow of pastness about it. Representation is a present experience referring to a past life, to an event that is passing or that has passed away. ”

“ Recognition completes what attention begins. The attentive man wants to know, the recognizing man knows, or thinks that he knows. Recognition implies accompanying attention. Attention without recognition implies wonder, curiosity, perplexity, perhaps terror. But what is the law of this process of recognition? Does the process affect the impressions themselves that are the basis of the recognition? The answer is: Very distinctly, recognition does affect the impressions. The activity involved in recognition alters the data of sense, and that in almost every case. ”

“ In all these cases, recognition involves a lively reaction of my mind upon external impressions. Recognition is not found apart from attention, though attention may exist more or less completely without recognition. ”

“ II. Of recognition in general: memory-images and movements.—There are two ways in whichWhat then is recognition? it is customary to explain the feeling of 'having seen a thing before.' On one theory, the recognition of a present perception consists in inserting it mentally in its former surroundings. I encounter a man for the first time: I simply perceive him. If I meet him again, I recognize him, in the sense that the concomitant circumstances of the original perception, returning to my mind, surround the actual image with a setting which is not a setting actually perceived. ”

“ Thus the result of symbolic reference is what the actual world is for us, as that datum in our experience productive of feelings, emotions, satisfactions, actions, and finally as the topic for conscious recognition when our mentality intervenes with its conceptual analysis. ‘Direct recognition’ is conscious recognition of a percept in a pure mode, devoid of symbolic reference. ”

“ I call the exercise of this factor in our knowledge ‘recognition,’ and the requisite sense-awareness of the comparable characters I call ‘sense-recognition.’ Recognition and abstraction essentially involve each other. Each of them exhibits an entity for knowledge which is less than the concrete fact, but is a real factor in that fact. The most concrete fact capable of separate discrimination is the event. We cannot abstract without recognition, and we cannot recognise without abstraction. Perception involves apprehension of the event and recognition of the factors of its character. ”

“ The reproduced state in its recognition recognizes the object as presented to sense-experience, recognizes, or is aware at least, that it has had some such recognitions on previous occasions, and at the same time recognizes, or is aware of its present recognition. ”

“ Thus, to recognize a man by certain marks of gesture and manner as a military man or a Frenchman, though popularly called a perception, is much more of an unfolded process of conscious inference. And what applies to specific recognition applies still more forcibly to individual recognition, which is often a matter of very delicate conscious comparison and judgment. To say where the line should be drawn here between perception and observation on the one hand, and inference on the other, is clearly impossible. ”

“ In our everyday life, as you will readily see, the tinge of sense-feeling may be overlaid by the heavier colours of some positive emotion; we may recognise an acquaintance with whom we are heartily angry, or whose conduct has brought us sorrow; primitive man himself recognised his enemies! But in the laboratory, where these disturbing influences are ruled out, the nature of the feeling of familiarity comes clearly to light; intrinsically, recognition is always an agreeable and relaxing experience. ”

“ The metaphysician, fully admitting the distinction we have been insisting on, may say, "but this discrimination is itself a mere analysis of mind. The 'state' of which the being is conscious is mind; and the fact of consciousness, with the being to whom it belongs, is also mind. ”

“ Yet for the sake of the young and inexperienced, who may perchance infer—from the two simple instances I have given above, of the manner in which I should recognize my Father and my Sons—that Recognition by sight is an easy affair, it may be needful to point out that in actual life most of the problems of Sight Recognition are far more subtle and complex. ”

“ Recognition is the function of representation and is the essential characteristic of this type of moment-consciousness. Ideational psychosis germinates and develops with the growth of the recognitive moment. For the very function of the idea is the cognition over again of what has been cognized in perception, in short, recognition is the essence of the idea. ”

“ We all leave our mark in a thousand subtle ways. No material microscope or telescope can detect, nevertheless our mark can be discovered by the powers of the human soul. From our cradle to the grave—does it stop there?—every thought, emotion, movement, and action have left their subtle traces, so that our whole life can be traced out by the psychometric expert. ”

“ The faintest and most obscure representation requires the presence of recognition in the background. We may say that without recognition representation becomes an impossibility. Recognition is the function of representative elements. Just as cognition is the function of sensory, presentative elements so recognition, or secondary cognition is the function of representative elements. Now that moment consciousness which has representative elements among the constituents of its content may be termed recognitive moment-consciousness. ”

“ We are, of course, in fact able to judge, when we recognize an object, that we have seen it before, but this judgment is something over and above recognition in this first sense, and may very probably be impossible to animals that nevertheless have the experience of recognition in this first sense of the word. ”

“ Recognition is an awareness of sameness. But to call recognition an awareness of sameness implies an intellectual act of comparison accompanied with judgment. I use recognition for the non-intellectual relation of sense-awareness which connects the mind with a factor of nature without passage. ”

“ This explanation by a 'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done: we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if, by faculty, you mean a principle of explanation of our general power to recall, your psychology is empty. The associationist psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of recollection ”

“ And as with memory, so with other of our mental powers, we may, I think, distinguish between a higher and a lower faculty of each; between our higher, self-conscious, reflective mental acts—the acts of our intellectual faculty—and those of our merely sensitive power. This distinction I believe to be one of the most fundamental of all the distinctions of biology, and to be one the apprehension of which is a necessary preliminary to a successful investigation of animal psychology. ”

“ So that to the one, sight is the instrument of reminiscence, and to the other, hearing. But to him who is by nature a philosopher, from whence and by what means is reminiscence the prelude of intellectual knowledge, and an excitation to that which truly is, and to truth itself? ”

“ Being freed from its bondage to the present circumstances, living in the by-gone past the recognitive moment gets a glimpse of the not yet born future into which the free representative elements are projected. ”

“ The first means of recognition is the sense of hearing; which with us is far more highly developed than with you, and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice our personal friends, but even to discriminate between different classes, at least so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral, the Square, and the Pentagon—for of the Isosceles I take no account. ”

“ With the activity of the symbol-making form of representation, which we have named Memory, and whose evidence is the invention and use of language, the true form of individuality is attained, and each individual human being, as mind, may be said to be the entire species. Inasmuch as he can form universals in his mind, he can realize the most abstract thought; and he is conscious. Consciousness begins when one can seize the pure universal in the presence of immediate objects here and now. ”

“ Before going on to speak of the effect of our own activity upon our knowledge, when attention is combined with active recognition of impressions, we want to formulate the law that governs the action of attention upon sense-impressions apart from recognition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In some cases recognition is possible; in other cases the change has been too great. Those who have since become Masters of the Wisdom are often instantly recognisable, even thousands of years ago, but that is for a very different reason. ”

“ It is not the feeling of familiarity that gives rise to recognition, but it is vague, indistinct, marginal, or subconscious recognition that gives rise to the feeling of familiarity. When a person, a scene, an event, or situation is familiar, the psychic state is one of having gone through the same experience before. ”

“ But, fortunately for us as thinkers, we possess the power of Representation; that is, of reproducing past perceptions and experiences in the shape of mental images or pictures, "in the mind's eye," so to speak, which relieves [Pg 77] us of the necessity of directly and immediately perceiving an object each time we desire or are required to think of it. The processes whereby this becomes possible are called the processes of Representation, for the reason that by them past experiences of Perception are re-presented to the consciousness. ”

“ Such a co-operation of assimilations and complications is seen in the most striking manner in those processes of association which in ordinary life are called "recognitions," or, if the scope of the region of association over which the recognition stretches is indefinitely larger, are called "cognitions." We recognise, for example, an acquaintance, whom we have not seen for a long time. ”

“ It is observable, that the idea of a sensation called up by association, and recognised as the idea of a sensation, is of course a remembrance. The recognition consists in that highly complex idea, consisting of three principal ingredients: 1, the point of consciousness called the remembering self; 2, the point of consciousness called the percipient self; 3, the successive states of consciousness which filled up the interval, between these two points.
An idea called up by association is not necessarily a remembrance; it is only a remembrance when recognised as having been an idea before. ”

“ Recognition refers to the already mastered; observation is concerned with mastering the unknown. The common notions that perception is like writing on a blank piece of paper, or like impressing an image on the mind as a seal is imprinted on wax or as a picture is formed on a photographic plate (notions that have played a disastrous rôle in educational methods) , arise from a failure to distinguish between automatic recognition and the searching attitude of genuine observation. ”

“ Can we then think that it is by mere touch we discover figure, as exactly as by the glance of our mature vision,—that we discover it, in all its varieties, originally by touch, and as accurately at first, as after innumerable trials,—when we discover it, only in a few cases, that are previously familiar to us, and even in these very imperfectly? The determination of the form impressed, in which we are almost conscious of a sort of intellectual measurement, has surely a much greater resemblance to the perceptions, which we term acquired, than to those which are immediate. ”

“ I shall maintain that the first type of functioning is properly to be called ‘Direct Recognition,’ and the second type ‘Symbolic Reference.’ I shall also endeavour to illustrate the doctrine that all human symbolism, however superficial it may seem, is ultimately to be reduced to trains of this fundamental symbolic reference, trains which finally connect percepts in alternative modes of direct recognition. ”