ii., a presentation is an object in the special form under which it is cognized at any given moment of perceptual or ideational process.
This, the widest definition of the term, due largely to Professor James Ward, thus includes both perceptual and ideational processes.
The term has, indeed, been narrowed so as to include ideation, the correlative representation being utilized for ideal presentation, but in general the wider use is preferred.
This use takes precedence of two others: (1) that of Hamilton, for presentative as opposed to representative theories of knowledge, and (2) that of some later writers who took it as equivalent to phenomenon.
Ward traces the doctrine in his sense to David Hume, to whom the mind is a kind of theatre in which perceptions appear and vanish continually (see Green and Grose edition of A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 534).