ABSTRACT
For examples of sensation, our thoughts turn naturally to the simple qualities of things—cold, sweet, blue, loud, and so on. When questions of its function in knowledge have arisen, the tendency has been to identify sensation with these qualities. And this done, the further question at once followed—how about the relations in which these qualities stand? what of their coexistence and succession, their resemblance and difference, their order in space, and so forth? And keeping to the idea of sensation as giving these simple sense-qualities and nothing else, two courses became open, one adopted by thoroughgoing sensationalists of “explaining” relations as due to some composition of sense-qualities, the other resorted to by Reid, and with a more penetrating analysis by Kant, of attributing the relational element, so to call it, to another activity of the mind different from its mere power of receiving impressions, to “spontaneity” instead of “receptivity.”
