If a sensation is perfectly new, there cannot, of course, be this process of classifying, and in this case the closely related operation of discriminating it from other sensations is less exactly performed.

But it is hardly necessary to remark that, in the mind of the adult, under ordinary circumstances, no perfectly new sensation ever occurs.
When the sensation, or complex sensation, is thus defined and recognized, there follows the process of interpretation, by which I mean the taking up of the impression as an element into the complex mental state known as a percept.

Without going into the philosophical question of what this process of synthesis exactly means, I may observe that, by common consent, it takes place to a large extent by help of a reproduction of sensations of various kinds experienced in the past.
That is to say, the details in this act of combination are drawn from the store of mental recollections to which the growing mind is ever adding.

In other words, the percept arises through a fusion of an actual sensation with mental representations or "images" of sensation.[6] Every element of the object that we thus take up in the act of perception, or put into the percept, as its actual size, distance, and so on, will be found to make itself known to us through mental images or revivals of past experiences, such as those 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.