It is to be noticed, further, that the perception of a single object or event is rarely an isolated act of the mind.  We recognize and understand the things that surround us through their relations one to another.  Sometimes the adjacent circumstances and events suggest a definite expectation of the new impression.  Thus, for example, the sound of a gun heard during a walk in the country is instantly interpreted by help of suggestions due to the previous appearance of the sportsman, and the act of raising the gun to his shoulder.  It may be added that the verbal suggestions of others act very much like the suggestions of external circumstances.  If I am told that a gun is going to be fired, my mind is prepared for it just as though I saw the sportsman.[10]

More frequently the effect of such surrounding circumstances is to give an air of familiarity to the new impression, to shorten the interval in which the required interpretative image is forthcoming.  Thus, when travelling in Italy, the visual impression answering to a ruined temple or a bareheaded friar is construed much more rapidly than it would be elsewhere, because of the attitude of mind due to the surrounding circumstances.  In all such cases the process of preperception connected with a given impression is effected more or less completely by the suggestions of other and related impressions.

It follows from all that has been just said that our minds are never in exactly the same state of readiness with respect to a particular process of perceptional interpretation.  Sometimes the meaning of an impression flashes on us at once, and the stage of preperception becomes evanescent.  At other times the same impression will fail for an appreciable interval to divulge its meaning.  These differences are, no doubt, due in part to variations in the state of attention at the moment; but they depend as well on fluctuations in the degree of the mind’s readiness to look at the impression in the required way.

In order to complete this slight analysis of perception, we must look for a moment at its physical side, that is to say, at the nervous actions which are known or supposed with some degree of probability to accompany it.

The production of the sensation is known to depend on a certain external process, namely, the action of some stimulus, as light, on the sense-organ, which stimulus has its point of departure in the object, such as it is conceived by physical science.  The sensation arises when the nervous process is transmitted through the nerves to the conscious centre, often spoken of as the sensorium, the exact seat of which is still a matter of some debate.

The intensification of the sensation by the reaction of attention is supposed to depend on some reinforcement of the nervous excitation in the sensory centre proceeding from the motor regions, which are hypothetically regarded as the centre of attention.[11] The classification of the impression, again, is pretty certainly correlated with the physical fact that the central excitation calls into activity elements which have already been excited in the same way.