The study of perception, pursued without prejudice by psychologists, ends up by revealing that the perceived world is not a collection of objects in the sense in which the sciences use this word, that our relation to the world is not that of a thinker to an object of thought, and that finally the unity of the perceived thing, about which several consciousnesses agree, cannot be assimilated to the unity of a theorem that several thinkers recognize, nor can perceived existence be assimilated to ideal existence.

As a result, we cannot apply the classical distinction of form and matter to perception, nor can we conceive the perceiving subject as a consciousness which “interprets,” “deciphers,” or “orders” a sensible matter whose ideal law it would possess. Matter is “pregnant” with its form, which is to say that in the final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the “world,” that both are present to us practically rather than being explicitly known or posited by us, and that finally the relation, which is somehow organic, of the perceiving subject and world involves, in principle, the contradiction of immanence and transcendence. (MERLEAU-PONTY, The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences, 1. Perception as an Original Modality of Consciousness)