part. In many cases this distinction is of fundamental importance.
Every simple, clear, plastic perception and every distinct idea, before it could be put into words, passes through a stage (which may indeed be very short) of indistinctness. So also in the case of association; for a longer or shorter time before the elements about to be grouped have actually come together, there is a sort of vague, generalised expectation or presentiment of association. Leibnitz, in particular, has worked at kindred processes, and I believe them to underlie the attempts of Herbart and Horwicz. The common acceptance of pleasure and pain as the fundamental sensations, even with Wundt's addition of the sensations of tension and relaxation, of rest and stimulation, makes the division of psychical phenomena into sensations and perceptions too narrow for due treatment of the vague preliminary stages to which I have referred. I shall go back therefore to the widest classification of psychical phenomena that I know of, that of Avenanus into "elements" and "characters." The word "character" in this connection, of course, has nothing to do with the subject of characterology.
Avenarius added to the difficulty of applying his theories by his use of a practically new terminology (which is certainly most striking and indispensable for some of the new views he expounded). But what stands most in the way of accepting some of his conclusions is his desire to derive his psychology from the physiology of the brain, a physiology which he evolved himself out of his inner consciousness with only a slight general acquaintance with actual biological facts. The psychological, or second part of his "Critique of Pure Experience," was really the source from which he derived the first or physiological part, with the result that the latter appears to its readers as an account of some discovery in Atlantis. Because of these difficulties I shall give here a short account of the system of Avenarius, as I find it useful for my thesis.
An "Element" in the sense of Avenarius represents what
