nothing penetrates to the quick or draws blood, as it were.According to Griesinger, " I see, I hear!" such patients say, 'but the objects do not reach me, it is as if there were a wall between me and the outer world!"
"In such patients there often is an alteration of the cutaneous sensibility, such that things feel indistinct or sometimes rough and woolly.But even were this change always present, it would not completely explain the psychic phenomenon...which reminds us more of the alteration in our psychic relations to the outer world which advancing age on the one hand, and on the other emotions and passions, may bring about in childhood we feel ourselves to be closer to the world of sensible phenomena, we lire immediately with them and in them; an intimately vital tie binds us and them together.But with the ripening of reflection this tie is loosened, the warmth of our interest cools, things look differently to us, and we act more as foreigners to the outer world, even though we know it a great deal better.Joy and expansive emotions in general draw it nearer to us again.Everything makes a more lively impression, and with the quick immediate return of this warm receptivity for sense-impressions, joy makes us feel young again.In depressing emotions it is the other way.Outer things, whether living or inorganic, suddenly grow cold and foreign to us, and even our favorite objects of interest feel as if they belonged to us no more.Under these circumstances, receiving no longer from anything a lively impression, we cease to turn towards outer things, and the sense of inward loneliness grows upon us.
...Where there is no strong intelligence to control this blasé condition, this psychic coldness and lack of interest, the issue of these states in which all seems so cold and hollow, the heart dried up, the world grown dead and empty, is often suicide or the deeper forms of insanity.
THE PARAMOUNT REALITY OF SENSATIONS.
But now we are met by questions of detail.What does this stirring, this exciting power, this interest, consist in, which some objects have?
which are those 'intimate relations' with our life which give reality?
And what things stand in these relations immediately, and what others are so closely connected with the former that (in Hume's language) we 'carry our disposition' also on to them?
In a simple and direct way these questions cannot be answered at all.
The whole history of human thought is but an unfinished attempt to answer them.For what have men been trying to find out, since men were men, but just those things: "Where do our true interests lie -- which relations shall we call the intimate and real ones -- which things shall we call living realities and which not ?" A few psychological points can, however, be made clear.
Any relation to our mind at all, in the absence of a stronger relation, suffices to make an object real.The barest appeal to our attention is enough for that.Revert to the beginning of the chapter, and take the candle entering the vacant mind.The mind was waiting for just some such object to make its spring upon.It makes its spring and the candle is believed.
But when the candle appears at the same time with other objects, it must run the gauntlet of their rivalry, and then it becomes a question which of the various candidates for attention shall compel belief.As a rule we believe as much as we can.We would believe everything if we only could.
When objects are represented by us quite unsystematically they conflict but little with each other, and the number of them which in this chaotic manner we can believe is limitless.The primitive savage's mind is a jungle in which hallucinations, dreams, superstitions, conceptions, and sensible objects all flourish alongside of each other, unregulated except by the attention turning in this way or in that.The child's mind is the same.
It is only as objects become permanent and their relations fixed that discrepancies and contradictions are felt and must be settled in some stable way.As a, rule, the success with which a contradicted object maintains itself in our belief is proportional to several qualities which it must possess.Of these the one which would be put first by most people, because it characterizes objects of sensation, is its --
(1) Coerciveness over attention, or the mere power to possess consciousness:
then follow --
(2) Liveliness, or sensible pungency, especially in the way of exciting pleasure or pain;
(3) Stimulating effect upon the will, i.e., capacity to arouse active impulses, the more instinctive the better;
(4) Emotional interest, as object of love, dread, admiration, desire, etc.;
(5) Congruity with certain favorite forms of contemplation -- unity, simplicity, permanence, and the like;
(6) Independence of other causes, and its own causal importance.
These characters run into each other.Coerciveness is the result of liveliness or emotional interest.What is lively and interesting stimulates eo ipso the will; congruity holds of active impulses as well as of contemplative forms; causal independence and importance suit a certain contemplative demand, etc.I will therefore abandon all attempt at a formal treatment, and simply proceed to make remarks in the most convenient order of exposition.
As a, whole, sensations are more lively and are judged more real than conceptions; things met with every hour more real than things seen once;
