A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/446 page 63
    CHAPTER IV PERCEPTION AND IMAGINATION AS COMBINATION AND DIFFERENTIATION OF ELEMENTS A. Perception and Imagination as Fusion and Assimi¬ lation It has appeared, in an earlier chapter, that perception and imagination are analyzable into irreducible sensational ele¬ ments. It is necessary now to emphasize the fact that in ordinary perceiving and imagining one is not aware of these elemental constituents of consciousness, the different qualities, intensities, and extensities. Such analysis is the reflective work of the psychologist, not the immediate experience of the perceiving self. Thus, one’s immediate consciousness of a tone is an undistinguished, unitary consciousness, and is not an awareness of a pitch, an intensity and a timbre, though tone-consciousness is analyzable, in after reflection, into these factors, and though it is due to distinguishable physical and physiological conditions. Similarly, the imme¬ diate consciousness of a tone sounded simultaneously with its octave is rarely an experience of two tones as distin¬ guishable from each other, though united; indeed, it is often difficult to differentiate these tones even by an effort of attention. The unity of an experience, in this merely negative sense of the absence of differentiation, is often known as fusion.1 * * These Arabic numerals, throughout this chapter, refer to numbered divisions (§§) of the Appendix, Section IV.
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