ABSTRACT
The simplest, most elementary kind of thinking, almost all the thinking of animals and of young children, is thinking of objects present to and affecting the senses, what we may call "present objects" in distinction from "remote objects." It is important to notice that we become aware of the complexity of the sensory quality only when we adopt the introspective attitude and make the quality of experience the object of our thinking. The more important question for psychology is that of the role or function of imagery in thinking in general, and in perceptual thinking in particular. The Sensationists will have it that the "images," clustering round the "sensations" excited by sense-stimulation, give "meaning" to them and convert the "sensations" into a "percept" of the object. The thinking of the object is a unitary act, a psychic response to a multiplicity of stimuli.
