A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Percept (13 quotes)
“The mind either perceives or judges. The acts are entirely different. When perceiving, a person is full of life, interested, curious, open and receptive. He experiences the world in a fully expanding spiral. But in judging a person is concerned with controls, regulating limits and precedents.”
Carl Gustav Jung
From the “Lists of One-Liners and Longer Jokes” list kept by Magaret Stewart and George Thompson, 1973 and later. Original source could not be found; mis-cited in the list as W. Jung.
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Percept
Concepts always follow percepts. In fact they are a kind of ossification of percepts — endlessly repeated percepts which frequently obscure invention and innovation.”
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 16, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 26
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Matching and Making
Current linguistics in general… have set about the adaption of grammar and literature to the abstract schemes once familiar to the schoolmen and Peter Ramus. This amounts to transforming percepts into concepts and reducing literature to logical schema.
Comments on John Ackerley’s PhD Thesis, (1978), p 1
Year: 1978
Chapter:
Logic & its Faultlines
Concepts are provisional affairs for apprehending reality; their value is in the grip they provide.
“Marshall McLuhan: High Priest of the Electronic Village” by Richard Kostelanetz, in Master Minds (1969), p 92
Year: 1969
Like the physicists, Heidegger is trying to do the new thing in the o/d way: he has retrieved percepts as a tool for exploring the occult (hidden) area, but the manner is still abstract {visual).
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 63
Year: 1988
Chapter:
Law of Implementation
Whereas science links the present to the past via concept, art leaps from the present to the future via percepts. Concepts isolate figures, while percepts relate figures and grounds as interplay.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 123
Year: 1972
In art, percept precedes concept, while in science, method dominates both.
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention”with Robert K. Logan, Et Cetera. 1977 , p 378
Year: 1977
The Euclidean space of analytic geometry is a concept of the left hemisphere of the brain, while the multi-dimensional spaces of the holistic sensorium are percepts of the right hemisphere of the brain.
“Alphabet, Mother of Invention” with Robert K. Logan, in Et Cetera, 1977, p 380
Year: 1977
They find concept a much more convenient form of human activity than percept. They ask me to judge what I observe.
“The Hot and Cool interview” (1967), in Media Research (1997), p 65
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Hostility to McLuhan
In The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra remarks the similarities between the forms of awareness implicit in modern physics and the traditional philosophy of Eastern, non-alphabetic cultures. The east bypasses hardware and absolute concepts in favour of percepts, that is, a “direct, non-intellectual experience of reality.”
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 43
Year: 1988
Dialectic functions by converting everything it touches into figure But metaphor is a means of perceiving one thing on terms of another. The concepts come after, often long after, the percepts.
Laws of Media: The New Science with Eric McLuhan, (1988), p 230
Year: 1988
Many of the basic percepts that are so effectively put in play in the perceptual training procedures of A. J. Kirshner came to attention in the educational practices of Maria Montessori.
Foreword, in Training that makes sense (1972), p 5
Year: 1972
Winters pushed criticism into a pattern of concept minus percept, which was also an unwitting parody of paraphrase and poetic commentary of the preceding time.
“Roles, Masks, Performances”, 1971, in New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 3, Spring,1971, p 521
Year: 1971
Marx and Engels saw conflicts of old figures as creating grounds for each other while they remained oblivious of the new information surround that had transformed their assumptions. They were attempting to match the concepts of an earlier age to the experience newly visible in the "rear-view-mirror" of the 19th century. They were unaware that percepts of existence always lie behind concepts of Nature.
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 12, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 15
Year: 1973
Chapters:
Marx, Karl | Pattern Recognition