New Essay Volume 3

Appendix 13. {fn 166)

[Understanding and perception]

Two questions can be asked: 'How is the understanding moved to perception?' and: 'Does the understanding perceive as soon as it has a sensation or does some time pass between the sensation and the intellection, in the first stage of human development?' It will he helpful if I discuss the first of the two questions (which have much in common) and indicate how I conceive that the understanding can he moved to perceive on the occasion of sensations.

There is no difficulty in the fact that sensitivity is drawn and moved by what is sensible; sensitivity is a passive faculty, and that which is sensible is a stimulus appropriate to the nature of sensitivity. But there is neither similarity nor communication of nature between sensation and understanding. We cannot therefore imagine that sensation moves the understanding with a real action as an efficient cause.

In my opinion, sensation occasions the movement of the understanding and rouses it to perception without any real communication between sensation and the understanding. Such communication comes about through the UNITY of the subject. We must remember that the sensitive myself is the same as the intellective myself, and that feeling produces instinct - for example, the stimulus of hunger felt in the stomach produces the instinct to look for food or seize it if it is at hand. So far we are in the order of feeling. I do not think it necessary to explain how feeling produces instinct; I simply indicate the fact that when an animal has certain sensations, it feels a need which sets in motion its motor forces and all the activity within the animal. This faculty of searching to satisfy a need is called instinct.

Beginning with this fact, I reason as follows. Myself (feeling and intelligent) experiences within itself a need arising from its sensitive nature. In this situation myself stimulates itself to put all its forces into operation in order to satisfy the need and be rid of it. But the forces which myself possesses include intellective forces. Myself therefore makes use not only of its feeling activity but also of its intellective attention because in the subject the feeling activity forms one, single force and radical activity with the intellective activity. In this way feeling, without acting directly in the intelligence, occasions intellectual movement; sense stimulates myself (which possesses understanding) to put the understanding into action. The UNITY OF MYSELF, therefore, in which sense and understanding converge, is the mediator and means of communication between these two entirely different potencies.