evolve together, and to be controlled at once by
external forces, or by one's own voluntary motions, identifies them in
their operation although they remain for ever distinct in their sensible
character. A physical object is accordingly conceived by fusing or
interlacing spatial qualities, in a manner helpful to practical
intelligence. It is a far higher and remoter thing than the elements it
is compacted of and that suggest it; what habits of appearance and
disappearance the latter may have, the object reduces to permanent and
calculable principles. It is altogether erroneous, therefore, to view an
object's sensible qualities as abstractions from it, seeing they are its
original and component elements; nor can the sensible qualities be
viewed as generic notions arising by comparison of several concrete
objects, seeing that these concretions would never have been made or
thought to be permanent, did they not express observed variations and
recurrences in the sensible qualities immediately perceived and already
recognised in their recurrence. These are themselves the true
particulars. They are the first objects discriminated in attention and
projected against the background of consciousness.

The immediate continuum may be traversed and mapped by two different
methods. The prior one, because it is so very primitive and rudimentary,
and so much a condition of all mental discourse, is usually ignored in
psychology. The secondary method, by which external things are
discovered, has received more attention. The latter consists in the fact
that when several disparate sensations, having become recognisable in
their repetitions, are observed to come and go together, or in fixed
relation to some voluntary operation on the observer's part, they may be
associated by contiguity and merged in one portion of perceived space.
Those having, like sensations of touch and sight, an essentially spatial
character, may easily be superposed; the surface I see and that I touch
may be identified by being presented together and being found to undergo
simultaneous variations and to maintain common relations to other
perceptions. Thus I may come to attribute to a single object, the term
of an intellectual synthesis and ideal intention, my experiences through
all the senses within a certain field of association, defined by its
practical relations. That ideal object is thereby endowed with as many
qualities and powers as I had associable sensations