Since consciousness is a specific faculty, it has a specific nature or identity
and, therefore, its range is limited: it cannot perceive everything at once;
since awareness, on all its levels, requires an active process, it cannot do
everything at once. Whether the units with which one deals are percepts or
concepts, the range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious
awareness at any given moment, is limited. The essence, therefore, of man’s
incomparable cognitive power is the ability to reduce a vast amount of
information to a minimal number of units—which is the task performed by his
conceptual faculty. And the principle of unit-economy is one of that
faculty’s essential guiding principles.