we have in handling the object, moving
to and from it, etc. It follows that if this is an essential ingredient
in the act of perception, the process closely resembles an act of
inference; and, indeed, Helmholtz distinctly calls the perception of
distance an unconscious inference or a mechanically performed act of
judgment.

I have hinted that these recovered sensations include the feelings we
experience in connection with muscular activity, as in moving our limbs,
resisting or lifting heavy bodies, and walking to a distant object.
Modern psychology refers the eye's instantaneous recognition of the most
important elements of an object (its essential or "primary" qualities)
to a reinstatement of such simple experiences as these. It is, indeed,
these reproductions which are supposed to constitute the substantial
background of our percepts.

Another thing worth noting with respect to this process of filling up a
sense-impression is that it draws on past sensations of the eye itself.
Thus, when I look at the figure of an acquaintance from behind, my
reproductive visual imagination supplies a representation of the
impressions I am wont to receive when the more interesting aspect of the
object, the front view, is present to my visual sense.[7]

We may distinguish between different steps in the full act of visual
recognition. First of all comes the construction of a material object of
a particular figure and size, and at a particular distance; that is to
say, the recognition of a tangible thing having certain simple
space-properties, and holding a certain relation to other objects, and
more especially our own body, in space. This is the bare perception of
an object, which always takes place even in the case of perfectly new
objects, provided they are seen with any degree of distinctness. It is
to be added that the reference of a sensation of light or colour to such
an object involves the inclusion of a quality answering to the
sensation, as brightness, or blue colour, in the thing thus intuited.

This part of the process of filling in, which is the most instantaneous,
automatic, and unconscious, may be supposed to answer to the most
constant and therefore the most deeply organized connections of
experience; for, speaking generally, we never have an impression of
colour, except when there are circumstances present which are fitted to
yield us those simple muscular and tactual experiences through which the
ideas of a particul