=The Exteriority of Objects of Sensation.=--Every thing or quality felt is felt in outer space. It is impossible to conceive a brightness or a color otherwise than as extended and outside of the body. Sounds also appear in space. Contacts are against the body's surface; and pains always occupy some organ. An opinion which has had much currency in psychology is that sensible qualities are first apprehended as _in the mind itself_, and then 'projected' from it, or 'extradited,' by a secondary intellectual or super-sensational mental act. There is no ground whatever for this opinion. The only facts which even seem to make for it can be much better explained in another way, as we shall see later on. The very first sensation which an infant gets _is_ for him the outer universe. And the universe which he comes to know in later life is nothing but an amplification of that first simple germ which, by accretion on the one hand and intussusception on the other, has grown so big and complex and articulate that its first estate is unrememberable. In his dumb awakening to the consciousness of _something there_, a mere _this_ as yet (or something for which even the term _this_ would perhaps be too discriminative, and the intellectual acknowledgment of which would be better expressed by the bare interjection 'lo!'), the infant encounters an object in which (though it be given in a pure sensation) all the 'categories of the understanding' are contained. _It has externality, objectivity, unity, substantiality, causality, in the full sense in which any later object or system of objects has these things._ Here the young knower meets and greets his world; and the miracle of knowledge bursts forth, as Voltaire says, as much in the infant's lowest sensation as in the highest achievement of a Newton's brain.
The physiological condition of this first sensible experience is probably many nerve-currents coming in from various peripheral organs at once; but this multitude of organic conditions does not prevent the consciousness from being one consciousness. We shall see as we go on that it can be one consciousness, even though it be due to the coöperation of numerous organs and be a consciousness of many things together. The Object which the numerous inpouring currents of the baby bring to his consciousness is one big blooming buzzing Confusion. That Confusion is the baby's universe; and the universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a Confusion, potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet actually resolved, into parts. It appears from first to last as a space-occupying thing. So far as it is unanalyzed and unresolved we may be said to know it sensationally; but as fast as parts are distinguished in it and we become aware of their relations, our knowledge becomes perceptual or even conceptual, and as such need not concern us in the present chapter.