1. Sensation and Perception

The first step in the process of production is to distinguish, as had not been done before Descartes, between “sensation” and “perception,” correlatively, between “sensing” and “perceiving.” The reason for making this distinction is the manifest difference between inner sensations and outer sense qualities. Sensing is the original having or receiving of impressions, whereas perceiving is the beholding of these as sense qualities of objects. By the first we have only a flood of inner impressions; by the second we have before us relatively stable complexes appearing as sense objects. Sensation is clearly prior to perception in that it provides the raw materials on which perception operates. Also, sensing is a kind of passivity or receptivity, whereas perceiving is a kind of activity or spontaneity. For although sensations may have external causes, there is no external cause of their being worked over and combined into sense objects. There is, for example, no outside stimulus causing me to transform and put together the visual, auditory and tactual impressions which 1 allegedly receive on picking up a baby’s rattle. The different kinds of sensations may be separately caused from without, but not their combination; this is my own doing on perceiving the rattle as a single sense object.

Although distinct, sensation and perception rarely if ever occur separately. Perception obviously cannot occur without sensation. Sensation, on the other hand, being prior to perception, might conceivably occur without it. Actually, however, the instant we have sense impressions we find ourselves perceiving sense qualities. Rarely, if ever, do we merely sense or merely have sense impressions; invariably we perceive them as sense qualities of things. This would suggest that perceiving, even though an activity, is almost as involuntary as sensing, that we cannot help perceiving sense objects with their sense qualities any more than we can help having sensations. Sensation, we might say, automatically “triggers” perception. This means that the activity of perceiving occurs simultaneously with the passive occurrence of sensations and, like sensations, must lie beyond the reach of observation.

This simultaneity entails that there is no lapse of time between the occurrence of sensations and their appearance as sense qualities, that sensations do not linger in the raw state or in any transition state, but are transformed the instant they occur. In this respect the process of perceiving is quite unlike any empirical process with which we are familiar. For all empirical processes extend over a certain interval of time, no matter how short, in the course of which the raw materials progress through successive stages before emerging as end products. Here, however, there is no such progressive transformation, no lapse of time between raw material and end product. Sense impressions and sense qualities are simultaneous in a fashion which seems to preclude any progressive transition from one to the other. The transition, therefore, must be, if not instantaneous, yet so exceedingly swift as utterly to escape detection, perhaps of the speed of some nuclear reactions. In any event we are dealing with unobservables—sensations, their transformation into sense qualities, and the brief duration of this transforming process, about which 1 shall have more to say later on. Because they are unobservable we can only frame hypotheses about them based on our observation of the end products. Let us proceed with these hypotheses.

2. Perception and Imagination

The first hypothesis is that what we call perception is really the work of the imagination and that this work advances in several stages. The first and lowest stage would be that of transforming sense impressions into sense qualities. A second and higher stage, or stages, would be that of “combining,” or “assodating,” or “synthesizing” these sense qualities into the sense complexes which we call sense objects, and these in turn into a sensory world. This complication of stages should not surprise us when we reflect that the total process we are considering is nothing less than that of fashioning for ourselves perceptions—more, a whole lifelong experience—of sense objects in a sensible world. This is truly an immense performance. Kant was perhaps the first to comprehend its magnitude and to probe its hidden intricacies in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason. For all its complexity, however, the process had for Kant one principal dynamic agency: the human imagination, which he described as “an art (Kunst) hidden in the depths of the human soul whose true processes (Handgriffe) we shall hardly ever extract from nature and bring unveiled to view” (K.d.r.v., A 141, в 181).

Obviously, this imagining which is one with perceiving is sharply to be distinguished from imagination in the usual sense of the term. Usually in the natural attitude we are at pains to hold apart what we imagine from what we perceive. An imaginary and a perceived prowler, for example, are two vastly different things for every householder. The extent to which we confuse what we imagine with what we perceive, as we sometimes do, is the measure of our inaccuracy and unreliability as observers—a grievous fault in scientific and legal matters.

To distinguish the two kinds or levels of imagination we shall call the one “primary” or “productive,” and the other “secondary” or “reproductive.” The productive imagination is clearly prior to the reproductive: its work must precede that of the latter. Its raw materials are the impressions of sense as they are originally given in consciousness. The materials of the secondary imagination are sense qualities, i.e., these same sensations but as already processed by the primary imagination. Other differenees will be noted hereafter.

But for all their differences they have a generic likeness which indicates that they have a common source in our one faculty of imagination. They are both activities or spontaneities of the mind; and they both deal with materials of sense. Active like thought, yet concrete like the senses, they lie intermediate, as it were, between thought and sensation, comprising a third faculty distinct from the latter two.

Although posterior to outer perception, the secondary imagination enjoys one distinct advantage; it is comparatively free whereas perception is bound. We cannot perceive what we will, but we can imagine just about what we please. This freedom disqualifies the imagination when we are concerned with accurate observation and reporting. But it is the quickening factor in another area of human life and interest, the realm of art. Here the spontaneity, originality, and power of the human imagination are most properly and impressively displayed in splendid edifices of sounds, words, colors, forms, stones. Here the imagination of man comes into its own and manifests an originative competence which is the wonder of all who reflect on it. May it not be that as the great world of art is the product of man’s reproductive imagination, so the vast world of sense is the product of his productive imagination?

The hypothesis is alluring. It links the world of art in a most novel way with the world of experience, and draws them both from the same hidden spring of consciousness. It makes both art and world lively products of the mind and intimate reflections of its inwardness. Little wonder that Kant regarded the imagination as “an art hidden in the depths of the human soul.” If he was not moved by these reflections when he penned his first Critique, he was probably moved by them when he penned his last.

Such, then, is the new theory of the human imagination with its two levels of operation. Setting aside the secondary level, let us turn to the primary level and follow the productive imagination through the several stages in the course of which it produces or “constitutes” perception.

3. Transformation and Projection

The first stage, as I remarked above, is that of transforming sense impressions into sense qualities. Now sense impressions in their original state are, like pains and aches, wholly private, inner, “subjective.” Being thus immediate contents of consciousness they should fall, again like aches and pains, within the direct purview of introspection. Actually, however, we never grasp them by introspection. The instant we receive a sense impression we perceive a sense quality; a sound is always a sound heard, a color always a color seen, a tactual quality a quality felt. As mere sensations they would not thus belong to any department of the “external” senses but solely to the “internal” sense or introspection, along with aches and pains and all the other immanent contents of our private streams of consciousness. The first thing that perception or the primary imagination does, therefore, in transforming sensations into outer sense qualities is to remove them from the purview of introspection and to place them in one or other department of the external senses where alone they can be seen, heard, felt, etc.

This is a remarkable transformation, this change from inner impression to outer quality. It is remarkable because it involves a change from something nonspatial to something spatial. Whatever is internal to consciousness and within the realm of introspection is in every instance devoid of spatial extension. Aches and pains, sensations of pleasure and hunger, ideas, thoughts, feelings, all are grasped in my stream of consciousness as “inside” me, not “outside” me in space. If some of these are “localized” and thus associated with parts of my body, this is a feature added to them by me, not a feature they possess intrinsically. Intrinsically their only locus is my stream of consciousness and their only extension is that of duration in time. Of spatial extension and spatial locus they possess nothing inherently.

This difference between inner and outer, between nonspatial and spatial—or “unextended” and “extended,” as Descartes put it—would seem to be so ultimate as to preclude any transforming of one into the other. Actually, we never observe any such transformation. Every time I reflect, I observe my inner data as inner, and outer data as outer; never do they even appear to change from one to the other. Nor do I see how they possibly could, any more than I can see how a color could change into a sound or vice versa.

In spite of this evidence, however, we are now to assume that certain, but only certain, of these inner data, namely, the “impressions of sense,” undergo precisely this transformation, that somehow they are endowed with spatial extension—or “extensity” as some have called it as though to soften the blow—and are thus transformed in a flash into outer qualities standing before the external senses, How this takes place we cannot say; it is “hidden in the depths of the human soul.” It is sufficient for the theory of sensation to assume merely that it occurs, that it is a transformation involving 1) a change from nonspatial to spatial, or from nonextended to extended, and 2) a change of venue from inner to outer sense.

The second stage ensues forthwith. The transformed sense impressions, once invested with “extensity,” are therewith “projected” outward and beheld as sense qualities “out there/’ filling space in all directions with an inexhaustible variety of hues and shades in endless combination, thus giving rise to the appearance of a sensible world with its host of sensible things.

Projection would seem to have been recognized by Descartes, although he did not label it “projection”; instead he compared it to the familiar psychological phenomenon of localizing pain. (Of transformation he seems to have been only dimly aware, as were most of his successors.)

The comparison will not hold up. For one thing, localization never extends beyond the limits of one’s own body, normally at least, whereas projection extends to the uttermost limits of perceptual space. For another thing, a localized pain is never transformed from an inner sensation into an outer quality of things. A pain localized in a tooth, for example, is never projected as a quality of the tooth. The tooth can be observed and extracted; the pain cannot. No matter how precisely it may be localized a pain always retains its essential inwardness and privacy, whereas projected impressions lose completely their original inwardness and privacy and become instead outward and public qualities of things. By no effort can I thus transform sensations of pain; and by no effort can I refrain from projecting impressions of sense. The former remain ever within the domain of introspection; the latter appear in the departments of outer sense. Clearly, projection and localization are so different as to be quite beyond comparison.

The mechanics of projection are as concealed from us as are those of transformation. Here too we must content ourselves simply with assuming that projection takes place and that it supplements transformation. The two go manifestly together and constitute the first stage in the total process by which the primary imagination fashions out of sense impressions a world of sense experience. The end product of this first stage is outer sense qualities. At the next stage these are “combined/’ “assembled,” “associated,” “synthesized” into sense objects.

4. Synthesis of Object and Field

At this stage, too, we fail to catch the mind at work. From sense impression to sense object, through transformation, projection, and synthesis, the workings of the primary imagination are so concealed and sudden that we can only surmise from their end products what they must be like in transit.

These end products are sensible objects in a sensible world, the “real” things we experience, handle, live by and with. Now if these things are all groups of sense qualities, as the sensation theory holds, then the grouping in question must be of a singular nature. It cannot be the loose togetherness of juxtaposition, a casual association into which sense qualities may indifferently enter or not. It must be rather an intimate union, binding and compelling beyond our conscious control and impossible to dissolve once the fusion has taken place. Such a union may be called “real” or “objective,” meaning thereby simply that the sense qualities thus fused have been transformed from an aggregate into a single thing (res) or “object.”

If this object synthesis is a kind of fusion, it must be different from another kind of synthesis which gives us the field of objects. Now object and field go inseparably together. We never perceive a sense object in stark isolation, but always in a sensible setting or horizon, in a field of environing sense objects. Correlatively, we never experience a field save as occupied by objects, even though the only discernible objects be oneself and one’s space capsule. This is important to note because some have spoken as though the field synthesis were subsequent to the object synthesis, as though we first combined sense qualities into sense objects and then in similar fashion combined sense objects into a sensible world. If object and field go thus together, the two corresponding syntheses must also go together; they must be concurrent, not successive. More than this, they must work intimately together. For, it will shortly appear that some features of the field synthesis are involved in the fusion of objects, and that fusion in some form is ultimately involved in the field synthesis.

As for the field itself, it has in every instance a luminous center, the focus of perception, from which it shades off in all directions becoming increasingly indistinct toward the periphery. Center and periphery are permanent features of the field, but their occupants are transient. With every shift of attention the occupants change; what is at one time central may at another time be peripheral, and conversely, depending on the direction and focus of our gaze. This sensible field with its ever-shifting foreground and background of sensible objects is none other than the world of sense experience. Or, if in thought we isolate it from its contents, it is the empirical space of the world.

Now if the field, too, is a product of synthesis, the synthesis from which it arises is not that of fusion. We infer this from the fact that the field is not itself a sense object but, precisely, the “one fiekl or horizon of sense objects,” their all-embracing “locus.” Not being an individual sense object, the field is not perceived in the same way that sense objects are perceived; its very ubiquity precludes its being the focal point of any possible perception. Still, as the ever-present setting of sense objects, as the abiding center and periphery of every perceptual grasp, it is in some sense perceived every time we perceive any object whatsoever. We might say that in perceiving a sense object we are at the same time coperceiving the sensible world, the two in inseparable union. This indicates that the field synthesis is not only other than the object synthesis, fusion, but also simultaneous with it.

To say anything more specific about this field synthesis we must look more closely at the field itself. Now the field, although unmistakably one, is yet many-layered; it has a visual layer, an auditory layer, a tactual layer, as many layers as there are departments of sense. This suggests the possibility of peeling off one by one the various departmental layers, like an onion, until nothing is left. This is to say that if you were to remove the sensory stuff of which any layer is composed, then presumably you would remove also that layer. This would be the plight of persons born blind or deaf; to the extent that they are deprived of visual or auditory sensations their fields would presumably lack a visual or auditory layer.

From this layered structure of the field one would naturally assume a corresponding kind of synthesis by layering, a superposing of layer on layer in such a way as to bring about a kind of congruence such that qualities from different departments of sense could be made to occupy the same space, have the same locus, direction, reference. By this congruence the “same” surface can be both shiny and smooth, i.e., it can be a single surface possessing both visual and tactual qualities. Similarly, we can speak of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, even tasting the “same” object. In these instances layering would appear to operate along with fusion in producing sense objects, and fusion with layering in making one the multilaminated field.

But more than this. Is not each departmental layer in turn the product of a prior synthesis? Must we not assume that the departmental layers cannot be superposed and brought to congruence until they have been separately formed? The manner of this formation would appear to be that of combining homogeneous sense qualities, colors with colors, sounds with sounds, tactual qualities with tactual qualities, so as to give rise individually to the various departmental layers. The qualities in this instance would seem to be juxtaposed, rather than superposed, inasmuch as like qualities are here projected side by side, so to speak, so as to spread out over the extension of the layer in question.

With these two phases of the field synthesis we would seem to be approaching the recognizable terrain of our common world of experience. The raw impressions of sense we have transformed and projected as sensible qualities and have synthesized these qualities by fusion, juxtaposition and superposition (or congruåïñå) into a sensible field of sensible objects. But this field of objects still falls short of the empirical world. It has no past or future, no temporal extension. To give it a time dimension we must invoke a further stage of synthesis. Only then can our product emerge as the empirical world.

5. Synthesis and Time

Up to this point I have considered neither past nor future, only the present. All the materials acted on by the primary imagination have been taken as present, as present together at the same time, simultaneous or tota simul. From raw sensations through all the stages of the process up to sensory field and object there has been no passage of time beyond the duration of the original sensations themselves. Had there been a passage of time beyond this duration, the sensory ingredients at some stage in the process would have vanished, and no end product would have issued forth, no object or field.

So far, then, we have only a present object, a momentary object without past or future—I shall consider the field presently. But every present object has both past and future; it encompasses, even as present, previous moments each with its momentary fusion, and moments yet to come. This temporal fullness of the object entails a further and higher fusion of many suecessive momentary fusions spread out over a span of time which we call the duration of the object. Only thus can the object become a relatively permanent and enduring thing, as all objects are for us.

This higher fusion we may call the “synthesis of identity,” inasmuch as by it the object acquires an identity which permits it to appear to us as the “same” object in many successive perceptions. Here memory and anticipation come into play, and with them arises the possibility of the familiar error of mistaken identity, an error which seems hardly possible in performing the mere momentary fusion. Thus at any given moment I may be correct in averring that I see this table; but I may be quite incorrect in believing that this table is the same table I saw here yesterday. Another one just like it may have been put in its place. On the other hand, if I am initially wrong about seeing a table at all, then my error is not one of mistaken identity; it is probably an illusion or hallucination.

Essentially the same considerations hold for the field. Each actual field must be as momentary as the sensations out of which it is wrought; it can endure only for the duration of its ingredients and with them must vanish into the past, to be followed by another equally momentary field, and this by yet another, and so on in the unremitting succession of time. Clearly, we must do with these momentary fields what we did with the momentary objects, much as we do with the successive frames of a movie film; combine them into the one vast field, or cinerama, of the sensible world. Only by this “cumulative” synthesis, as I shall call it, can the world acquire extension and continuity in time, as well as extension in space, and thus approximate the familiar world of our common experience.

In this cumulative synthesis, as in the synthesis of identity, memory and anticipation are involved. Here, too, a kind of mistaken identity is possible, as in the tragically distorted worlds of the paranoid or psychotic.

But the important point here is the role of memory and anticipation in the synthesis of identity and the cumulative synthesis. This role is indispensible because in both instances the materials to be synthesized are not simultaneous, but dispersed in time and hence not available for combination at any one moment. At any one moment only one field is present and actually available for processing; all the others are either past or future and thus apparently beyond the reach of the present operation. To be available at this present they must be remembered or anticipated. But to be remembered or anticipated is to be made only vicariously present, that is, to be “re-presented” by replicas or images supplied by memory and anticipation. Even if these replicas and images are accurate, they are still only residues or shadows of the actual fields which they represent. And, to the very extent that they are accurate, they are fixed with a lifeless permanence which may fit them for the record, so to speak, but which would totally unfit them for any present processing. Exactly the same for past and future objects. Like past and future fields, they too would seem not to be proper grist for the mill of the primary imagination.

How images of fields can literally be combined with an actually present field, or images of objects with an actually present object, is not at all clear. The previous stages offer no clue. For they all perform literal combinations of actual sense qualities with actual sense qualities, never actual sense qualities with mere images of sense qualities. They are fully actual in that their materials are actually present, not vicariously present in the form of images or representations supplied by memory or anticipation. The synthesis of identity and the cumulative synthesis, on the other hand, are not thus fully actual. There is about them an obscure quality of “inactuality,” if I may so call it, or vicariousness, which sets them sharply apart from the preceding “momentary” syntheses.

6. The Primordial Time-Synthesis

But now these momentary syntheses become suspect. Kant suggests that all synthesis is time-synthesis, the gathering together of a manifold which has to be gone through in time and by this scanning process brought within the unity of a single apprehension. A familiar example of this would be looking at a statue from all sides as we walk around it, or “taking in” a large room simply by turning in one position. Here plainly a multitude of appearances or perspectives—momentary objects I have called them—is gone through in sequence and combined into the complex perception of statue or room. If what is here combined are the many perspectives given in succession, then their synthesis into a single object is clearly a time-synthesis, the synthesis of identity.

But what of each momentary perspective or object? Is it, too, precisely as momentary, the result of a time-synthesis, a time-synthesis prior to the synthesis of identity and the ситиlative synthesis? Hitherto 1 have evaded this question. I have simply assumed a group of given momentary sensations and their momentary processing into a momentary object (or perspective) in a given momentary field. Of these momentary operations I remarked only that they take place simultaneously with the momentary sensations and persist only so long at these momentary sensations endure. This will no longer suifice. I must now ask how long these momentary sensations endure. What is the duration of the “momentary?”

If this duration is greater than zero, as it presumably is—that is, if it is not merely instantaneous, not merely “now”—then no matter how short it may be, it must have distinguishable instants dispersed over a time interval. The sensation, too, must be spread over this time interval; it must have a beginning and end and points in between. From first to last each point in turn becomes “now,” all the other points being for that instant either before or after, gone or not yet, past or future. To scan this interval and to combine its successive materials into a “momentary” sensation, a primordial time-synthesis is plainly required, without which we would have no momentary sensations or impressions at all, but only an inchoate flux of sensory materials hopelessly jumbled together, occurring only for an instant, vanishing at once and giving way to another, and so on—a “manifold of sensibility” as Kant called it.

What this primordial time-synthesis is like we can infer, perhaps, from another time-synthesis which we can directly observe. Consider, for example, a tone as it is actually heard in its run-off from beginning to end—say, a single note in a familiar melody. Although the tone is strictly present only at each living “now” in its duration, still at each of these “nows” it is actually present as “just having been” and as “just about to be”—or “abouting to be” (we have no future participle in English). In other words, each “now” is more than a mere point-instant; it is rather a “living now,” which shades off at both ends into an immediate before and an immediate after, a continuous shading off in which at one end the tone itself is retained, not recalled, and at the other “protained,” not anticipated. I repeat, it is the tone itself that is retained and “protained,” not an image of the tone: which means that the principal adjuncts here are not memory and anticipation with their supply of images, but their more primitive forms, which Husserl calls “retention” and “pretention.”* Once the tone has been thus perceived it may then be recalled or anticipated; and in the process of being recalled or anticipated it may—now as an image—repeat the original run-off with its succession of “nows” bound together by retention and protention.

Notice that we have been speaking here of a tone, not of an auditory sensation; speaking, too, of its perception, not its production as a sense object. This is important to bear in mind when, taking this observable process as a clue to what happens with unobservable sensations, we assume that in their run-off momentary sensations are the result of a similar time-synthesis, in this instance an unobservable, wholly conjectural, “primordial” time-synthesis. Here the process is no longer one of perceiving; for we do not perceive sensations; perception is still in the offing. Rather, the process is that of producing originally the momentary sensations out of which the primary imagination fashions perception and its object. The difference between the two syntheses is decisive.

The end product of the one synthesis is “having-heard-thetone”; the end product of the other is a momentary sensation. Their raw materials are equally disparate. That of the synthesis in hearing is from beginning to end a tone heard. That of the assumed synthesis is not even a sensation, at least not a momentary sensation, since this is its end product. It must be something more primitive than sensations, a mere “manifold of sensibility.” This manifold is at every instant an undifferentiated mass which vanishes as soon as it occurs, is succeeded in the “now” by another mass equally undifferentiated and instantaneous, and this by yet another mass, and so on in the unremitting flow of our conscious life. By hypothesis, this primitive flowing stuff is sensory; but it is not yet sensations. To get sensations out of it we must invoke a primordial time-synthesis. But before we can get this synthesis going we must first sift and differentiate out of the successive undifferentiated masses of sensory stuff just those homogeneous elements which will COalesce into single momentary sensations—into auditory, visual, tactile sensations. This would seem to argue for some kind of instantaneous picking and choosing in accordance with fixed criteria of selection—an elaborate process prior even to the primordial time-synthesis and calling, I should think, for a sophisticated kind of equipment, which at this elementary level is all but unthinkable.

This, however, is not the only difficulty. Another arises when we ask as to the timing of those operations of the primary imagination which finally issue in perception and experience—transformation, projection, and the several syntheses. If the materials of these operations are momentary sensations, as we have assumed, and if momentary sensations are the end products of a primordial time-synthesis, then it would seem that the primary imagination can begin to operate only after these timesyntheses have completed their work. But once completed, a momentary sensation is over and done with; it is no longer available for processing. Only an image of it supplied by memory would be thus available. This would render the whole operation of the primary imagination utterly inactual and vicarious, and, more important, rob it of any core of actuality, of being concretely present and “now.” Plainly, this will not do.

If, on the other hand, sensations become available before the completion of the primordial time-synthesis—say, just after, or even as, it begins—then the above processes could start almost at once with the time-synthesis and run concurrently with it. In this event the sensory materials of these processes would not be momentary sensations, but the more primitive sensory Stuff of the manifold. This would seem to render superfluous the primordial time-synthesis and its resulting momentary sensations. All that is now required would be the primitive sensory stuff of the manifold and the instantaneous sifting of the homogeneous therefrom. This would entail, however, that the processes in question be also instantaneous, that from transformation and projection through the higher syntheses, from raw material to end product, no interval of time can elapse. There could be no lapse of time simply because the materials processed are ever merely “now,” without duration, instantaneous. Such an instantaneous processing eludes my understanding completely.

And so, with or without the primordial time-synthesis, with or without momentary sensations, the operations of the primary imagination would seem to be incomprehensible, if not impossible. The difficulty lies with their raw materials. These materials cannot be momentary sensations, for momentary sensations vanish at once on issuing from the primordial timesynthesis. And they cannot be instantaneous sensory manifolds, for this would entail that the operations, too, be instantaneous. Moreover, in both instances an instantaneous sifting of the homogeneous would have to precede the whole process. Such are the difficulties that arise when we attempt to make clear the temporal character of the operations by which the primary imagination produces sense perception.

7. Two Kinds of Time-Synthesis

There was no such difficulty with the psychological timesynthesis in the hearing of a tone, principally because this synthesis is not productive, not a processing of raw materials into an end product. The synthesis here does not “produce” the tone. The tone itself is a sense object produced by the human voice or a musical instrument—according, at least, to the natural attitude. What is here synthesized is the “hearing-of-thetone,” our sense perception of the tone. Clearly, this synthesis is one with the act of hearing itself—an act, I repeat, which from beginning to end is an act of hearing, one act by virtue of the tone heard and a synthetic act by virtue of the retention and protention involved.

Similarly, with looking at the statue as we walk around it, and taking in the room as we turn on our heel, there is a suecession in the seeing and a corresponding succession in what is seen, the successive perspectives. These visual perspectives lack the homogeneity of the simple tone. But for all their diversity they “add up” in precisely the same way, by retention and protention, into the seeing-of-the-statue or the seeing-of-theroom. Once again, what is here “synthesized” is not the objects seen or their perspectives. In no wise are these perspectives literally put together, combined as ingredients in an end product, the object. Like the phases of the tone they are “out there,” products of an empirical situation in which they can be as readily photographed as seen by the human eye. Nor is it quite proper to speak of the act as “synthesized”; for it is itself a synthesis in the manner of retention and protention. What it synthesizes is not an alien raw material, but in a way itself as a single act of awareness. Putting it briefly, “synthesize” here is an intransitive, not a transitive verb.

This notion of an intransitive synthesis is much in need of further clarification. This need I shall attempt elsewhere to satisfy. For the present this much, I think, is clear. An intransitivé synthesis is a kind of act or activity which Aristotle called energeia (plural, energeiai) and characterized as being complete and actual at every instance in its duration. It is complete in that its completion does not await the formation of an end product, and actual in that it is throughout an act of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, or the like. A transitive or productive synthesis, by contrast, is not complete until the process is over and not fuUy actual until the end product is finished. All perception, inner as well as outer, is activity in this sense of energeia.

As an instance of a transitive or productive time-synthesis—a very important instance—consider our use of language. Take a simple utterance such as “It is raining.” The utterance obviously takes time; it has a run-off beginning with the first syllable of the first word and ending with the last syllable of the last word. Since each syllable and word must be spoken in succession, a cumulative time-synthesis must be operating at each instant, retaining what has been traversed and “protaining” what is to come, and finally combining the dispersed elements into a single whole, the sentence as end product of the utterance. This productive synthesis, in Aristotle’s terms, is not complete until the process is over and not actual until the surviving sentence is finished. In a way, the surviving sentence is the actuality of the utterance. It survives the utterance in that it can be endlessly repeated, translated, recorded, criticized, analyzed, and so on. It is to this extent a public object in the public domain of the intellect. Its objective status, to be sure, is not that of a physical or sense object; it is rather that of an ideal or intelligible thing. But it is nonetheless “real,” as real as language itself, as science, knowledge, philosophy, and other such “objects” that go to make up the “cultural” dimension of human society.

If, on this very sketchy basis, I be allowed to say that for the natural attitude the empirically real contains things intelligible as well as sensible, things ideal as well as physical, 1 would then venture further to say that our mental activities with respect to these two kinds of objectives are correspondingly different; that with respect to things sensible or physical our perceptions are energeiai, nonproductive, and with respect of things ideal or intelligible, productive. Another way of saying this would be that we “discover” the sensible, but produce or “constitute” the intelligible. In the intelligible realm—this “noosphere,” as Teilhard de Chardin called it in his Phenomenon of Man—we may say that the mind of man is a kind of mens creatrix; that in acquiring knowledge, for example, the knower must virtually produce or constitute his knowledge, though not for that reason the object known. In the sensible realm, on the other hand, the mind of man is not a maker or creator, but a discoverer, observer, explorer of what is already “there”—by acts which are aH energeiai, but which can provide the basis for further productive acts of knowing.

With this schema, in spite of its oversimplification, we have a vantage point from which to view the whole program of this chapter, that of producing out of sensations the sensible world of experience. From this perspective the program would appear to be based on the erroneous assumption that al! time-syntheses are productive, hence that the sensibility, like the intellect, must produce or constitute its objects in the acts of apprehending them. A curious feature of this assumption is that it applies only to outer or sense perception, not to inner perception. The reason for this, of course, is that only the former involves sensations. Thus it is another consequence of the sensation theory that it has obscured the distinction between productive and nonproductive time-syntheses, acts that are constitutive and acts that are energeiai.

This completes my exposition of the productive process of constituting out of sensations a sensory world of experience. I began by following the intricacies of this assumed process through its hidden stages—transformation, projection, the syntheses of fusion, juxtaposition, superposition, identity, and the final cumulative synthesis—right up to its end product, which alone is manifest, the sensory world of sensory objects. At this point 1 turned back on the material basis of the whole process, sensations, and observed that be they instantaneous or momentary, they involve insuperable difficulties, difficulties which spring from the failure to distinguish between time-syntheses which are productive and those which are not. In this wise is the initial “subjectivizing” of the sense qualities of things reversed by an assumed “objectivizing” performance of the primary imagination.

One final comment on this amazing performance. Viewed from the natural standpoint the performance would seem to have not one, but two end products: 1) our experience of the empirical world, and 2) the empirical world of our experience, the one being our own private acquisition, the other a vast public fact. But remember, we are moving within the framework of the theory of sensation and ideas and that, according to the theory of ideas, perception and object, experience and world, are not two, but one; that as “ideas” (Vorstellungen, etc.) they are the same. Hence we could confidently assume from the outset that in fashioning perception and experience out of sense impressions the mind was fashioning at the same time and out of the same materials the objects perceived and the world experienced. This in effect is what Kant proclaimed when he equated the conditions underlying the possibility of experience with those underlying the possibility of the objects of experience.

But if this equation of awareness and object is central to the theory of the productive process which I have just expounded, it is not central to another theory of the productive process which I have not expounded. I refer to Husserl’s celebrated theory of “constitution,” which differs sharply from Kant’s theory on this very point: it restores the radical distinction between awareness and object which Kant’s equation denies. With this important difference we have a clear basis for distinguishing an earlier and a later version of the productive process, a Kantian and a Husserlian version.

Having expounded the Kantian version I shall next turn to the Husserlian. Before doing so, however, 1 want to make a few remarks about the term “constitution” and about intentionality as the ground for Husserl’s distinction between awareness and object.

8. Constitution: Kant

“Constitution” in the present context is plainly but another word for “formation,” “construction,” “production,” “making,” “fabricating,” “fashioning,” all of which are familiar terms signifying empirical processes of various kinds. To use these familiar terms is to invite empirical comparisons. But empirical comparisons are to be avoided because the hidden operations of the primary imagination are not empirical; they are preempirical or “transcendental,” hence sui generis. It is desirable, therefore, to avoid these familiar terms with their empirical associations, and to employ the unfamiliar word “constitution” to signify the transcendental process of “constituting” sense experience out of sensations.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant did not use either the noun “constitution” or the verb “constitute.” He used only the adjective konstitutiv. The mathematical principles of the pure understanding are konstitutiv, the dynamical principles only regulativ, with respect to phenomena (B, 296). With respect to empirical knowledge, however՜ he says later on (B, 692) that all the principles of the understanding are konstitutiv, whereas the principles of reason, the “ideas,” are only regulativ. His covering definition here is that a principle is konstitutiv if it is a “principle of the possibility of the experience and the empirical knowledge of objects of sense” (B, 537). This is as far as Kant got with the word, although with the doctrine he attained to a classical formulation.

Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their successors in the German tradition were nearly as sparing as Kant in their use of the word “constitution.” The doctrine, of course, they made thoroughly their own, each modifying it somewhat in his own way. Hegel’s modification was perhaps the most important. He lifted the whole process of constitution out of the hidden depths of the individual subject, openly rebuilt its machinery with his logical “dialectic,” deployed it as a cosmic “phenomenology of mind or spirit,” and brought it to a grandiose consummation where history, metaphysics, and logic converge. In effecting this revolutionary shift from subjective consciousness to objective mind or spirit, Hegel also shifted his ground from perception to thought, from Anschauung to Begriff. With this shift “concept” replaced “sensation,” and constitution took a turn which led it quite beyond the orbit of this essay on sensations. It is for this reason that I accord Hegel’s majestic doctrine no more than this passing mention.

It was not until 1913 that the word “constitution” was brought to the prominence it now enjoys. In his Ideen, published in that year, Edmund Husserl used “constitution” to characterize one of the decisive features of his “Phenomenology.” This characterization was doubly appropriate, for in expanding the use of a Kantian term Husserl was also effecting a radical revision of the Kantian doctrine.

9. Constitution: Husserl

This revision has to do initially with the traditional term “idea” and the ambiguity with which it is freighted. We noted several times how “idea” can stand for perception and perceived, experience and experienced, either or both. We noted, too, how by transfer the same ambiguity infects the words “perception” and “experience/’ how they too can stand indifferently for 1) the subjective process of perceiving or experiencing, and 2) the object perceived or experienced. It was this ambiguity, incidentally, which permitted Descartes in carrying out his methodical doubt to think away the existence of the sensible world and yet retain intact all his perceptions and experience of such a world. This is thinkable, of course, only if we assume that what we perceive or experience is indistinguishably one with perception and experience itself, i.e., if both are “ideas,” Vorstellungen, perceptiones (as with Leibnitz).

To the natural attitude this ambiguity is unacceptable, because it denies in effect the distinction between our awareness of objects and the objects of which we are aware, a distinction which no one, I believe, will question when it comes to “outer” objects. All will agree that our private acts of awareness-—perceiving, experiencing, imagining, remembering, thinking, feeling, and so on—are utterly distinct from the public objects to which these private acts refer. In these instances, at least, we distinguish unfailingly between awareness and object.

Husserl restored this distinction with his notion of “intentionality” and therewith dispelled at a stroke the disabling ambiguity in the traditional “idea.” For intentionality makes imperative the radical distinction between intending act and intended object, as we shall see more clearly in the next chapter. Husserl never lost sight of this distinction. It was for him foundational. And this despite the fact that he persisted in using the German word Vorstellung. In translating Vorstellung, therefore, we must be careful with Husserl to render it not as “idea,” but as “presentation” or “representation,” indicating thereby that Husserl is not reverting to the traditional view with its inherent ambiguity.

Intentionality was lost to modern philosophy at its very inception; Descartes, perhaps under the influence of Suarez, abandoned it completely. Intentionality did not reappear until late in the nineteenth century with Brentano, Husserl’s teacher. Husserl saw in it the “essence” of consciousness and made it the central tenet of his Phenomenology. In assuming this central role intentionality was destined to affect the whole doctrine of constitution beyond restoring the distinction between awareness and object. Let us glance briefly at the revision which it entailed.

In expounding the Kantian version of constitution I deliberately neglected what was uppermost in Kant’s mind: namely, that the operations of the primary imagination are carried out under the aegis of reason, more specifically, under the blueprint of a set of categories, the supervision of a staff of schemata, and the high command of a transcendental unity of apperception. Important as this doubtless is, it was peripheral to my central concern with sensations and with the changes they must undergo when we assume that they are the raw materials out of which experience is wrought. Accordingly, in describing these changes I simply ascribed them to the operations of the primary imagination without any thought of a higher authority from which they might derive an intelligible rationale, a sovereign motive.

The question of such a higher authority, however, is bound to arise. Eventually we must ask why the mind should represent to itself an external world which is in fact internal to consciousness. Why should the mind confront itself with an independent existence which is not independent at all? Why should the mind fabricate a world and then take this world for “real”? On the face of it, it sounds like a vast self-deception. Is it?

Kant believed not and had an answer. His answer, in barest outline, is borrowed from Leibnitz’s principle of phaenomenon bene jundatum: the phenomenal world constituted by mind is the genuine appearance of the noumenal world of things-in-themselves. Only thus is the phenomenal world truly appearance; without the noumenal world it would be not appearance but apparition, deception or illusion.

This is not Husserl’s answer. Husserľs answer, also borrowed from Leibnitz, is based on Leibnitz’s notion of “monad.” This Husserl modified, rendered “radical,” by infusing it with intentionality. According to Husserl, the monad is a closed system of inwardness which must preclude all outwardness For whatever is alleged to be external to the monad (or consciousness) must be “intended” as such and hence must really be internal. This is to say that to be intended is to be brought within the intending consciousness. Thus by virtue of its intentional essence consciousness is an “absolute” monad, absolute because “in principle” it excludes nothing—or includes everything.

Husserl’s answer, then, is that it is the nature of consciousness to intend, to constitute, an “external” world; a consciousness not of this nature or essence is inconceivable. This points up, I think, the contrast between the answers which Kant and Husserl offer to the ultimate question of why the mind constitutes a world.

Clearly intentionality is the key to understanding Husserl’s version of constitution. It is with intentionality, accordingly, that I shall begin my exposition of Husserl, bearing constantly in mind that constitution issued from the theory of sensation long before the advent, or reappearance, of intentionality.

*See Husserl’s Ideas, pars. 78 & 81; also his Vorlesungen zur Phaenomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 1928.