ABSTRACT
PERCEPTION is the knowledge we have of objects or of their movements by direct and immediate contact, while intelligence is a form of knowledge obtaining when detours are involved and when spatio-temporal distances between subject and objects increase. It is possible then that intellectual stractures, and notably the operational groupings which characterise the final equilibrium reached in the development of intelligence, pre-exist, wholly or in part, from the outset in the form of organisations common to perception and to thought. This particular idea is the central doctrine of the “Configuration theory”, which, although it knows nothing of the notion of a reversible grouping, has described laws of complex structuring which, it claims, govern perception, response and elementary functions as well as reasoning itself and in particular the syllogism (Wertheimer). It is therefore essential that we should start with perceptual structures, to enquire whether we may not derive from them an explanation of the whole of thought, including groupings themselves.
