The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt.

  • Watt, Henry J. (Henry Jackson), 1879-1925.
Date:
[between 1910 and 1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The importance of the sensory attribute of order / by H.J. Watt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    If this be so, then the only basis in sense to which we may hopefully ascribe the functions of cognition is the systemic ordinal attribute and its line of integration. Cognition would thus be its outgrowth or integrate. Much, of course, if not all, has still to be done before such a conclusion could be said to have been established with all the vigour of scientific scrutiny. We should require to make a microscopic examination of many instances of thought pro- cesses. We should have to establish the ordinal nature of thought by the widest possible survey of its forms and by study and inferences from its relations to other experiences and even to the body.^ This would be a task requiring the fullest and most detailed experimental studies. Mere intro- spective observation is not enough, although that would have to be procured in its finest forms. A great deal of inductive arrangement and inferential approximation would have to be done before the statement of the case could be held to be satisfactorily attained. We should have to learn to pin cog- nition on to its basis properly, as in organic chemistry the highly complex compounds are gradually analysed and placed correctly in the hierarchy of compounds. It is only by such procedure as this that we can hope to bring sense and cognition into perfect continuity and so to discover their common root. Not that this root is precisely common to both, as if each were a stem bearing its own branches and leaves. It is more probable that sense is the root of intellect, drawing its food of specific determinations from the physical world and at the same time building up from that nourishment a stem and branches finally bearing in the intellect a vast wealth of leaves, blossoms, and seed. If we can hope by such means to give some explanation of cognition, we may also aspire to an understanding of the mysteries of recognition and memory. The obscurity and wonderment of these has always been felt to lie in the con- sciousness of renewal, of again-ness, that attaches to them. It seems an impossible task to explain how we can become conscious that a present experience has been ours before. But the practical needs of recognition are served not so much by a consciousness of repetition, though that may be in some respects a more striking experience, but by the knowledge that an experience that we have for the first time is new to us. And that can be explained easily enough if we suppose that both in the complex mental life of man and in animal life that is characterised rather by habits, effects are produced ^ For the style of argument I may refer to my discussion of the ordinal nature of pitch.