Our conclusions depend upon perceptions made by ourselves and others.
And if the perceptions are good our judgments _may_ be good, if they are
bad our judgments _must_ be bad. Hence, to study the forms of
sense-perception is to study the fundamental conditions of the
administration of law, and the greater the attention thereto, the more
certain is the administration.
It is not our intention to develop a theory of perception. We have only
to extract those conditions which concern important circumstances,
criminologically considered, and from which we may see how we and those
we examine, perceive matters. A thorough and comprehensive study of this
question can not be too much recommended. Recent science has made much
progress in this direction, and has discovered much of great importance
for us. To ignore this is to confine oneself merely to the superficial
and external, and hence to the inconceivable and incomprehensible, to
ignoring valuable material for superficial reasons, and what is worse,
to identifying material as important which properly understood has no
value whatever.