Reading Notes: April 19th, 2022

“The idealist’s argument may then be restated, omitting the term which Mr. Turner criticizes. Such a restatement runs, briefly, as follows: Both the idealist and the neo-realist admit (1) that they have a consciousness indicated by the terms “yellow,” “cold,” and the like. The neo-realist holds (2) that he also perceives directly an extra-mental object, yellow, and cold. But if this second statement be challenged (as by anyone who says “the object is gray, not yellow”) the neo-realist must fall back upon the position which he occupies with the idealist. No reiterated assertions, “the object is yellow,” “yellow…is an adjective applicable only to material objects” will prevail against the stubborn counter-assertion, “No. The object is gray.” There is nothing left to the realist except the insistent statement “I have the consciousness indicated by the term “yellow,” not by the term “gray.” This proof, from the admitted occurrence of illusion, that the object of immediate certainty is experience (i.e., consciousness) is merely the first step in an idealistic philosophy. But it is an undemolished barrier to all forms of neo-realism (Calkins, Idealist to Realist, Once More: A Reply, 297-298) 

“Our ideas and concepts of material things and processes owe all their specific content to sense-presentations. Their nature is determined for thought only in terms of qualities and relations belonging to visual, tactual, and other sensations. The extension of matter, for example, has no meaning for us apart from our experience of the extensiveness of visual and tactual sensations. Similarly, the motion of material things has no meaning apart from our experience of the displacement of visual sensations within the general field of visual sensation, or of tactual sensations within the general field of tactual sensation.” (Stout, Things and Sensations, 1-2) 

“The unity of consciousness is radically different from any unity which can belong to a material thing. Every material thing is extended in space and therefore consists of parts spatially external to each other and spatially separable from each other. It is divisible into component portions, each of which exists independently as a material thing or parcel of matter in the same way as the whole which is constituted by their union. The cup, for instance, which I hold in my hand is apprehended by me as one thing, but the separate subsistence of its parts as distinct bodies is forcibly brought home to me if it falls on the floor and is broken in fragments. On the contrary, the unity of and distinctness of an individual consciousness is not thus composed of parts, each possessing independently a separable unity and distinctness of the same kind. It cannot be broken into fragmentary thoughts, feelings, and volitions, or fragments of thought, feeling and volition, each persisting like the pieces of the cup, when I have ceased to think, feel and will. A material thing is composed of material things; but a conscious self is not composed of conscious selves.” (Stout, Manual of Psychology, 13) 

“Nowhere in nature do we find things having primary qualities without secondary, or, in more accurate language, nowhere do we find pure quantity devoid of quality. Quantity without quality is an abstraction, and a world of quantity without quality is an ens rationis, not a self-existing reality but a schematic view of certain selected aspects of reality.” (Collingwood, Idea of Nature, 113-114) 

“The world which we first discover is the world of matter, of things which strike our senses. This world rushes impetuously into our mind at the beginning of our natural experience. And these material objects are many not only de facto but also de jure. They must be, they cannot but be many if we are to consider them as material things. It is their peculiar nature, it is their very essence to be an indefinite multitude. A material thing means a thing occupying space. And space is made up of elements, each one of which excludes all the others and is therefore conceived independently of the others, must so be conceived. For it is the very nature of space to be divisible. When it is narrowed down to a point and cannot be further subdivided, then it ceases to be space. Its divisibility signifies that space is nothing more than the sum of its parts; that it contains nothing in addition to these parts; that it therefore resolves itself into them without at all losing its being and without any of the parts being deprived of anything which was theirs in the whole. In fact, if anything were lost of the entire whole, this loss could not but be felt in each single part. A book, considered as a material thing, is composed of a certain number of printed leaves stitched together; and if the leaves fall apart, they may be brought together again so that they will compose the same book as before. An iron rod weighs the same before and after it has been broken up into parts." (Gentile, The Reform of Education, 94-95) 

“Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that unity which fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a number, which correlates among themselves the units which constitute the number. We could strip multiplicity of all unity only by not thinking it. But then in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly enough would not be unity, but it would not even be multiplicity, because it could not be anything at all. Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely unthinkable. Thought then establishes relationships among the units of the multiple, and thus constitutes them as the units of the manifold, and as forming multiplicity. It adds and divides, composes and decomposes, and variously distributes, materialising and dematerialising, so to speak, the reality which it thinks. For it materialises the reality when it conceives it as manifold: but it can conceive it as such only by unifying it, and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it into its own spiritual substance.” (Gentile, The Reform of Education, 107) 

“Matter is a manifold reality, without unity. What it is we already have seen: a material reality, and as such divisible into parts, placed in the world in the midst of a congeneric multitude. Now, since pure multiplicity is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract from that relationship to which the reciprocal exclusiveness of manifold elements is reduced, it is evident that matter and things are abstract entities. Thought stops to consider them, and regards them as existent, only because it withdraws the attention from that part of itself which it contributes to the making of the object represented. Thought therefore prescinds from that unity which material things could not by themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an absurd conception. Objective things then, the world of matter itself which we are wont to oppose in equipoise to the person, are in truth not separable from it. For matter has its foundation in thought by which the personality is actualised. Things are what we in our own thought counterpose to ourselves who think them. Outside of our thought they are absolutely nothing. Their material hardness itself has to be lent to them by us, for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and multiplicity implies spiritual unity.” (Gentile, The Reform of Education, 107-108) 

“We cannot turn back on ourselves and make an object of ourselves and look at it…to put it before us, to consider it, to observe it…That thing we make an object is, ipso facto, not the subject itself…The real subject is not there, but the very thing that is trying to make itself an object—and can’t. If it could and became an object, it would be no longer subject. Indeed, if it became an object, who or what would see or perceive the object? It is that which sees, perceives, and thinks that is the subject, and it is forever a subject. Even if you could imagine yourself seeing it or thinking it, it would really be not what you saw or thought, but you yourself that were seeing or thinking. In brief, the subject that knows cannot be the object of knowledge.” (Salter, Schopenhauer’s Type of Idealism, 17-18) 

“For that with which the sciences deal is always something which I may call mine but which I cannot call me. Every attempt to resolve the latter into a combination of the former may be convicted of contradiction, for it takes as independently real those objects which can exist and contain meaning only in reference to a subject.” (Stewart, Carlyle’s Place in Philosophy, 170) 

“The remedy for bad metaphysics is to be found in philosophy, not in science.” (Bradley, The Principles of Logic, 342) 

“What a difference in this respect between the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic! In the former, what clearness, definiteness, certainty, firm conviction which is freely expressed and infallibly communicates itself! All is full of light, no dark lurking-places are left: Kant knows what he wants and knows that he’s right. In the latter, on the other hand, all is obscure, confused, indefinite, wavering, uncertain, the language anxious, full of excuses and appeals to what is coming, or indeed of suppression.” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II, 43-44) 

“Just as a plane can never obtain cubical content by being indefinitely extended.” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II, 382) 

“Nothing can be more clumsy than that, after the manner of all materialists, one should blindly take the objective as simply given in order to derive everything from it without paying any regard to the subjective, through which, however, nay, in which alone the former exists. Samples of this procedure are most readily afforded us by the fashionable materialism of our own day, which has thereby become a philosophy well suited for barbers’ and apothecaries’ apprentices.” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II, 382) 

“We never perceive the objects of the external world immediately, rather we perceive only the effects of these objects upon our nervous apparatus, and this has been so from the first moment of our life. By what means then have we been brought from the world of the sensations of our nerves to the world of reality? Obviously only through an inference; we must posit the presence of external objects as causes of our nervous excitation; for there can be no effect without a cause.” (Helmholtz, Optics, 115-116) [Underlining is mine]

“Since [a] percept is the creation of a given neuronal system, its characteristics will depend on and directly reflect the properties of this system….In the example of vision, light falling on objects activates the brain by the process of phototransduction, during which photoreceptors at the retina transform electromagnetic energy into electrochemical activation, which in turn sends a neural signal to the rest of the visual brain. This light has specific characteristics which are determined by the properties of the reflecting object (i.e., carries information), and so determines the characteristics of the elicited brain activation. Thus, the characteristics of a percept are dictated by both the perceptual system which creates it and the properties of the physical object we are looking at. In this way we can acquire objective knowledge about the world, albeit in a very subjective manner. Perception is therefore characterized by an objective subjectivity or, to say it perhaps better, a subjective objectivity. Objectivity, since the transformation from the physical to the perceptual world follows certain constant, reliable rules. Subjectivity, since each percept is created by a perceptual system and therefore its characteristics depend on the properties of the latter….The characteristics of the percepts created by the brain do not solely depend on the bottom-up processing of incoming sensory information, but are also determined by top-down mechanisms reflecting previous experiences of the subject….A percept is the result of such inference process based on the internal representation generated by the brain….Perception is making predictions and thus percepts are reconstructions of the world around us that represent our best guess as to what is out there, based on the statistics of how sensory information impinges on the sense organs.…The reality we experience is our best guess at how to reconstruct the world based on what most probably generated our sensory inputs.” (Moutoussis, The Machine Behind the Stage: A Neurobiological Approach toward Theoretical Issues of Sensory Perception, 2) [Underlining is mine]