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Most of the theories of sense-perception which have been put forth from the earliest days of speculation to the present time have been forms of Representationism, in which the mind is supposed to infer or to know external realities by means of intermediate representatives or agents. Nearly all these theories have owed their existence to one or both of the common doctrines, that the fundamental difference in nature between mind and matter makes the immediate knowledge of the latter impossible, and that the mind can know or act only where it is. The very opposite natures of mind and matter have long been supposed to constitute an entire and unquestionable impossibility of immediate intercourse between them. To explain, then, the possibility of the cognition of material objects by the immaterial mind, a great variety of theories of images, ideas, or mediate agencies, differing in nature, origin, place, and operation, have in successive ages been propounded by philosophers. The other doctrine, that the mind can know or act only where it is, has also made itself greatly felt, and has given rise to similar, or confirmed the apparent necessity of the same, theories of images or vicarious agents to explain perception across an interval of space". (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

Space perception.