perception serve as a sign to bring much more to the mind. Psychological
experiments have conclusively proved that we never actually perceive all
that we imagine to be there. Hence arise illusions, examples of which
may be easily thought of--incorrect proof-reading is one, while another
common one is the mistake of taking one person for another because of
some similarity of dress. What is actually perceived is but a fraction
of what we are looking at and acts normally as a suggestion for the
whole. Now, although it is true that, in practice, Perception and Memory
are never found absolutely separate in their purity, yet it is necessary
to distinguish them from one another absolutely in any investigation of
a psychological nature. If, instead of a perception impregnated with
memory-images, nothing survived from the past, then we should have
"pure" perception, not coloured by anything in the individual's past
history, and so a kind of impersonal perception. However unreal it may
seem, such a perception is at the root of our knowledge of things and
individual accidents are merely grafted on to this impersonal or "pure"
perception. Just because philosophers have overlooked it, and because
they have failed to distinguish it from that which memory contributes to
it, they have regarded Perception as a kind of interior and subjective
vision, differing from Memory only by its greater intensity and not
differing in nature. In reality, however, Perception and Memory differ
fundamentally.

Our conscious perception is just our power of choice, reflected from
things as though by a mirror, so that representation arises from the
omission of that in the totality of matter which has no bearing on our
needs and consequently no interest for us. "There is for images merely a
difference of degree and not of kind between 'being' and 'being
consciously perceived.'"[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 30 (Fr. p.
25).] Consciousness--in regard to external perception--is explained by