The Faculty Of Perception

The object is only for the subject as its idea.

This means that every special class of ideas is only for an equally special quality in the subject.

I call this the faculty of perception.

Kant called as “pure sensibility” the relation of space and time with each other as empty forms.

The relation of cause and effect, and matter and action, is understanding.

Thus all matter, or the whole of reality, is only for the understanding.

The first, simplest, and ever-present example of understanding is the perception of the actual world.

This is throughout knowledge of the cause from the effect.

Therefore, all perception is intellectual [mental].

The [mind] understanding could never get perceptions without the animal body.

Thus, the animal body is the immediate object of the subject.

The perception of all other objects becomes possible through the animal body.

The changes which every animal body experiences, are immediately felt.

These effects are linked immediately to their causes.

This creates the perception of causal objects.

This relation is immediate knowledge.

What the eye, the ear, or the hand feels is data, not perception.

The [mind] understanding passes from the effect to the cause.

The world first appears as perception in space, persisting through time.

This is because the understanding unites space and time in the idea of matter as causal action.

The world as idea exists only through and for the [mind] understanding.

In chapter 1 of my essay on “Light and Colour” I explained how the [mind] understanding builds perceptions out of sensory data.

The following prove that perception is [mental] intellectual, and not merely of the senses*:

• blind people from birth who have been operated on to gain their eyesight
• the single vision of the double sensation of 2 eyes
• the double vision and double touch which occur when the organs of sense have been displaced from their usual position
• the upright appearance of objects while the picture on the retina is upside down
• the attributing of colour to the outward objects when it is merely an inner function

Perception is pure knowledge through the [mind] understanding from effect to cause.

This refutes Hume’s contrary doctrine that cause and effect comes from experience.

This is because the independence of the [within-the-mind] a priori property of the knowledge of causality of experience can only be deduced from the dependence of experience on the [within-the-mind] a priori property of the knowledge of causality.

This deduction can only be accomplished by proving that the knowledge of causality is included in the perception-idea that includes all [sensory data] experience.

Therefore the knowledge of causality (respect of experience) is:

• completely [within the mind] a priori
• does not presuppose experience
• is a precondition by experience