[1] The view that depth is a visual datum in the same sense as breadth seems to me in flagrant contradiction with experience. But for our present purpose the question is only one of degree, as no one maintains, that either depth or breadth are seen without education as an adult sees them.
But this impossibility of getting at an original datum only shows how entirely we are right in saying that our world is constructed by judgment. For the process of interpretative amplification passes quite continuously from the unconscious to the conscious; and every definitely expressed judgment, though perfectly homogeneous with the processes which have qualified its datum, and though it may fall wholly within the maximum of what in ordinary parlance we should call a simple given perception, contains an identification of some ideal element, enlargement, or interpretation, with that relatively given element which reveals itself through a peculiar quality of presentness pervading the “given” perception.
In the example “That is a table,” the unity of judgment is so well shown that the identification becomes almost unreal. In fact, we never judge except to satisfy an interest and so simple a judgment used as an example, apart from any context which could explain the need for it, has an air of unreality. You may hear a child make such a judgment { 31} constantly in the sheer pleasure of recognition. An adult would never make it explicitly unless in some particular context; but it is made, as I shall maintain below, by the mere glance of his eye which takes in the table as a real object in a real world of space. Its appearance to the eye is in this case the datum, while the interpretation consists in construing this appearance as a solid individual existence in space.
We will look at an example in which the discrimination of elements is easier. Take the affirmation, “That is a cab,” assuming it to be made from merely hearing a sound. In this we can much more nearly separate the datum or minimum of sense from our enlargement or interpretation of it, and we know that our interpretation is liable to be wrong; that is to say, the reality into which we ought to construe the sound may be some other kind of vehicle, and not a cab. Now compare this with the affirmation, “That (which I see) is a cab.” This judgment of sight-perception, though its terms are more inextricably interwoven, has just the same elements in it as the judgment of sound-perception, “That (which I hear) is a cab.” In the sound-perception the structure is quite plain. A particular complex quality in the sound suggests as its objective explanation, what is perfectly distinguishable from it in thought, the movement of a cab on a particular kind of pavement. The quality of the sound, its roughness, loudness, increase and decrease, all form points of connection with the sound of a cab as we know it, and with the speed, weight, etc. of such a vehicle. But it is quite easy to consider the sound in itself apart from its interpretation, and we sometimes feel the { 32} interpretation to be more immediate, and sometimes more inferential. We sometimes say, “I hear a cab,” just as we say, “I see one,” but in case of sound we more often perhaps say, “That sounds like--” such and such a thing, which indicates a doubt, and the beginning of conscious inference.