ABSTRACT
With the aid of our eyes we recognize a human being as such whether he is in our immediate neighbourhood or a certain distance away. His actually apparent size is of no importance for us; furthermore, in the process of recognition, no part is played by the bodily position of the person recognized, or by our own. A man thus remains a man for us, whether he is standing or sitting before our eyes, so that we either see his right or left side, his front or his back, or watch him lying down, walking, running and so on. And, as we have said, the same is true for ourselves as observers; whether we are at rest or in motion, and in whatever way, we always recognize in the same manner. Again, the most various types of human beings are immediately recognized by us for what they are, whatever may be their appearance and form in detail. We conclude from all this that recognition does not depend so much upon how many, and which, of the elements of vision are excited on our retina. Our eye is only the organ of reception, which transmits the stimuli received to our central nervous system. The act of recognition is a purely intra-central event, and this recognition does not merely occur when what is recognized corresponds to a single or a few types, but on the contrary, there are unlimited possibilities in the ways in which optical impressions of an external object, for example a human being, can reach us, and none the less, the person in question is immediately and directly recognized by us as a human being. The process of recognition, therefore, never takes place in any schematic and automatic way, but always bears entirely a creative character.
