That a thing means something to us is equivalent to saying
that it symbolises something for us, that we are aware of some
of the relations which it sustains to other things. Now, the
mind shows itself from the very outset as a relating activity.
We have previously analysed one of the most elementary forms
of this relating process in our account of recognitioin. On
the level of perceptual and sensory activities the crude, vague
identifying of one experience with an antecedent one must
represent in the infant consciousness the first outcropping in
an explicit way of the relational factor, the first appearance
of the awareness of meaning. An experience which is recog-
nised, no matter how vaguely, is thereby in our very manner
of feeling it connected by us with something else not present.

Meaning in Sensory Material. -- The manipulation of the
sensuous material of experience. -- now in an analytical, dis-
criminative way, and now in a synthesising, associative way --
results inevitably from the very first in the disclosure of
innumerable relations involved among masses previously
sensed in a rude, inchoate manner. Certain typical forms
under which this analytic-synthetic development of relations
occurs, we have already described in the chapter on attention,
so that we need not repeat the matter at this point. We
are emphasising here, however, as we did not do at that
juncture, the fact that our noticing of differences and like-
nesses in the material presented to our senses rests upon our
ability to note and employ the relations which these proc-
esses of attention throw into relief. It is, in short, because
the elements which we thus break out from the total mass of
unanalysed sense experience possess meaning for us, symbolise
relations of one and another kind, that we can employ them
coherently and efficiently. Without this element of appre-
hended meaning they would remain disconnected, wholly irra-
tional and inert bits of mentality; curious perhaps, but cer-
tainly useless. The element of meaning joins them to one
another in a vital organic union.

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