Abstract
From sensations and their conjunctions arise concepts, whose aim is to lead us by the shortest and easiest way to sensible ideas that agree best with the sensations. Thus all intellection starts from sense perceptions and returns to them. Our genuine mental workers are these sensible pictures or ideas, while concepts are the organizers and overseers that tell the masses of the former where to go and what to do. In simple tasks, the intellect is in direct touch with the workers, but for larger undertakings it deals with the directing engineers, who would however be useless if they had not seen to the engagement of reliable workers. The play of ideas relieves even animals from the tyranny of momentary impressions. If civilized man provides for the future more than the savage and works for goals that far transcend his own life, he is enabled to do so by his concepts and their wealth of ordered ideas. However we experience often enough how much less immediate it feels to deal with ideas than with sensible ideas. We will not easily refuse to help some unfortunate whom we actually meet, while a printed appeal for help is read much more reflectively. The platonic Socrates occasionally declares virtue to be knowledge. Yet it must be a kind of knowledge that is not always very lively. Few crimes would be committed if the consequences were vividly and accurately imagined.
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Notes
How much concepts lag behind sensation and imagination as regards immediacy is shown by the following occurrence. In a university town in which two nationalities A and B lived in a state of mutual tension a professor of nationality A had his apartment on the second floor of the institute for pathological anatomy and occasionally held a dance at home. At once a newspaper championing the interests of the Bs published an article entitled ‘Dancing over corpses’, which provoked a street riot against the professor. The impulsive mob may have felt that a professor who daily associates with corpses should not enjoy another happy hour unless he were quite depraved and heartless; at least that was what the newspaper men pretended to believe. Yet who allows his pleasure to be disturbed by the thought that men die every minute, or that his own relatives lie buried?
Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, London 1870, I, 164, p. 365.
E. Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, Brunswick 1877. All instruments, tools and machines are regarded as unconscious projections of bodily organs. This seems rather to obscure Spencer’s idea, and I think that what will be reached in this way will be only a dreamlike ‘philosophy of technology’. Ask yourself which organ is projected in a screw or wheel, in a dynamo or interference refractometer and so on. What is correct is merely that the study of technology did help us to gain understanding of some bodily organs as well.
O. Wiener, Die Erweiterung der Sinne, inaugural lecture, Leipzig 1900.
I have myself occasionally tried such an estimate of the sensitivity of a sense organ. Cf. Beweglichkeitsempfindungen, Leipzig 1875, pp. 119f.
Strictly speaking the sense for heat which is spatially allied to the sense of touch.
P 3, Leipzig 1903, p. 398.
A 4, 1903, p. 209.
Revue générale des sciences 1892.
P, pp. 124–134.
Ribot, Essai sur l’imagination créatrice, Paris 1900, pp. 89–97. Cf. A, p. 250.
Erman, Ägypten II, pp. 352, 605 f.
M 5, 1904, pp. 88, 195.
A, p. 185.
The theory here referred to is that put forward by Johannes Müller and further developed by Hering.
J. Müller, Über die phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen, Koblenz 1826.
F. P. Gruithuisen, Beiträge zur Physiognosie und Eautognosie, Munich 1812, pp. 202–296.
Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, Leipzig 1860, II, p. 498. Cf. also A, p. 157.
Oelzelt-Newin, Über die Phantasie-Vorstellungen, Graz 1889, p. 12, reports that having killed many snakes that had pestered him he spent the following sleepless night being constantly pursued by what seemed to be their actual appearances and movements. The same happened to me after several days of experiments with spiders: I saw them creeping round me in my dreams. Once, when I raised a young sparrow on grass-hoppers, I was confronted in a dream by a man-sized grasshopper crawling towards me as though it would menace me with Schiller’s words: “Earth for all has ample space, wherefore persecute my race?”
A, p. 159.
Swoboda, Die Perioden des menschlichen Organismus, Vienna 1904. I was unable to observe a precise periodicity in myself, although the appearance of freely rising imaginations often comes to me. Perhaps a sharp periodicity shows itself only in very sensitive individuals.
Semon, Mnene, Leipzig 1904.
See note 20 above.
Very sane and sober views on this in R. Wallaschek, Anfänge der Tonkunst, Leipzig 1903, especially pp. 291 f.
Cf. the charming small pamphlet by E. Kulke, Über die Umbildung der Melodie, Prague 1884. Analogous considerations apply to the transformation of harmony. To mention only one example, take the sequence in the Flying Dutchman, ballad scene and overture, where the chords F major, E b major, D minor follow one another, and moreover with glaring breach of the rule forbidding successive fifths. It is only a slight modification of the trivial sequence F major, dominant seventh and back to F major, which is precisely what makes it so attractive.
It is related that Kekulé saw his benzol ring as a hallucination in a London fog, but his own simple report about his speculative efforts in London and Ghent does not support this view (Berichte d. Deutschen ehem. Gesellschaft XXIII 1890, pp. 1306f.).
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Mach, E., Hiebert, E.N. (1976). Sensation, Intuition, Phantasy. In: Knowledge and Error. Vienna Circle Collection, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1428-1_9
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