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It is possible to distinguish in ourselves four things: sensation, perception, conception, and the signs by means of which we designate objects, that is their names; these enable us to separate the one from the other. We must not imagine that these four exist as separate entities, “no words are possible without concepts, no concepts without percepts, no percepts without sensations.”[28]—Science of Thought, p. 2.

These four constituent elements of thought are merely four different phases in the growth of what we call our mind.

I employ these terms because they are in use in philosophical language; there are also many others constantly on the lips of philosophers, some of them newly coined. This is greatly to be regretted, as much of our confusion of thought arises from this superabundance of philosophical terms. If such words as impression, sensation, perception, intuition, presentation, conception, soul, reason, and many others could for a time be banished from our philosophical dictionaries, and some only readmitted after they had undergone a thorough purification and were made to return to their primitive signification, an immense service would have been rendered to mental science; as every writer defines them as he will, or uses them without definition; and he seems to imagine that because there are so many words, there must also be so many variations, “Because in the German language there are two words: verstand and vernunft, both originally expressing the same thing, the greatest efforts have been made to show that there is something to be called verstand, totally different from what is called vernunft; and as there is a vernunft by the side of a verstand in German, English philosophers have been most anxious to introduce the same distinction between understanding and reason into English”;[29] and “because we have a name for impression, and another for sensations, we are led to imagine that impressions do actually exist by the side of sensations. But what was originally meant by impression was not something beside sensation, but rather one side of sensation, namely, the passive side, which may be spoken of by itself, but which in every real sensation is inseparable from its active side.”[30]