Reading Notes: July 7th, 2022

“Though it would be unwarrantable to resolve a thing, as some have done, into a mere meeting-point of relations, yet it is perhaps as great a mistake to assume that it can be anything determinate in itself apart from all relations to other things. By the physicist this mistake can hardly be made: for him action and reaction are strictly correlative: a material system can do no work on itself. For the biologist, again, organism and environment are invariably complementary. But in psychology, when presentations are regarded as subjective modifications, we have this mistaken isolation in a glaring form, and all the hopeless difficulties of what is called “subjective idealism” are the result. Subjective modifications, no doubt, are always one constituent of individual experience, but always as correlative to objective modifications or change in the objective continuum. If experience were throughout subjective, not merely would the term subjective itself be meaningless, not merely would the conception of the objective never arise, but the entirely impersonal and intransitive process that remained, though it might be described as absolute becoming, could not be called even solipsism, least of all real experience.” (Ward, Entry on “Psychology” in The Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), 549) 

“No amount of objective physiological research can tell us anything about the real nature of a feeling, or can discover new feelings. Granting that neural processes are at the basis of all feelings as of all mental activities, we can infer nothing from the physiological activity as to the nature of the psychic process. It is only such feelings and elements as we have already discovered and analyzed by introspection that can be correlated with a physical process. Nor can we gain much light even if we suppose—which is granting a good deal in our present state of knowledge—that there exists a general analogy between nerve growth and activity, and mental operations. If relating, i.e., cognition, is established on basis of inter-relation in brain tissue, if every mental connecting means a connecting of brain fibres, we might, indeed, determine the number of thoughts, but we could not tell what the thoughts were. So if mental disturbance always means bodily disturbance, we can still tell nothing more about the nature of each emotion than we knew before. We must first know fear, anger, etc., as experiences in consciousness before we can correlate them with corporeal acts.” (Stanley, Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, 6-7) 

“It is obvious enough that no feeling can be revived into a representation of itself, but no more can any cognition or any mental activity.” (Stanley, Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, 6-7) 

“Sense and thought, both are realizations of the aboriginal potentialities of the real. They are capable of grasping reality because they are the realizations of the powers of the real to know—and to know is to know reality. Further, the bodily organs are neither channels of knowledge nor instruments of knowledge, much less causes of knowledge. The eye does not see; nor do we see with the eye. The eyes are only external expressions of the realization of the power of sight, which is totally a spiritual activity. They are only its symbols. The same is true of the brain. It is only an external expression, an indication, a symbol of the realization of thought. Sense and reason directly apprehend reality; the changes in sense-organs and brain are modifications of prior realizations indicative of the realization of sensing and thinking. If these modifications are obstructed, the obstructions are indicative of obstruction in the realization of sensing and thinking. The real has railed to work the changes in former realizations which must be made along with the realizing of new powers.” (Hasan, Realism, 18-19) 

“But that the real is not in its realization bound down to any definite physical conditions, is brought out by the daily experience of adaptation. It is its yearning to realize itself which brings about the necessary changes in the organs of the body. Its power of sight will realize itself; the eye is not in the proper condition; that power exerts itself to its demands and puts it in the proper disposition. This, even when the eye is not quite normal. Some portions of the brain are removed, others are made to function as indications of as indications of the realization of mentality. Indeed, the physical apparatus, e.g. the visual, is incapable of giving all we see. We see distance and volume, which this photographic camera does not and cannot convey. The “impressionists” in art base their case on these facts and call the former art mechanical. They give objects as we actually see them; while the “mechanical” art produced them as they would be for a photographic camera—it had to train the eye (the sight) to look at things as they would look to a photographic camera.” (Hasan, Realism, 19) 

“This view of the process of the real would seem to be in consonance with the view that human consciousness takes of sense and thought. On the one hand, it affirms the external objects and attributes to reality the qualities which the unsophisticated man attributes to it; and, on the other, it holds the directness of perception and keeps it free from physiological complications which make perception representation and are the chief stumbling-block in the way of its directness. Moreover, it pointedly brings out that sense is activity and not passivity. It is clear that according to the view suggested above sense-organs are not causes, but are, on the contrary, effects of sense. They are modifications wrought in the organism as by-products by the power of sense-perception in the process of its realization. Strictly speaking, they are not even instruments with which the sense works. Sense does not work by means of them. They are concomitant with the realization of sense, and are therefore only external expressions, indications, symbols of its realization. They do not play any part in perception. They only indicate to the external observer that it is taking place.” (Hasan, Realism, 19-20) 

“But a concomitant variation does not necessarily mean causation. It may simply be an inseparable accident. Indeed, the sense-organs are in no case constitutive of sensa. They and their conditions are simply indicative of the effective or defective realizations of sense-powers. Only in the former cases, sense apprehends reality. What it apprehends in the latter cases are partly its own creations like the after-images. The objection of the relativity of sensa to sense-organs, applies in fact, mutatis mutandis, in all its stages equally to thought. The abnormalities, temporary or permanent, of brain are accompanied by abnormalities in thinking. But, it is not contended on that account, that thought is relative to brain and that conditions of brain are constitutive causes of the objects of thought. Apparently, the reason is that in the case of sense we seem directly to experience that sense-organs and their conditions are connected with sensing and sensa, while we do not similarly observe the connectedness of brain and thought. But that is no vital difference. In both cases the relation is not that sense-organs are causes of sensing or sensa, and brain the cause of thinking or thoughts. On the contrary, it is rather sense that is the cause of sense-organs and thought that of brain—and the physical organs are only external expressions, indications, symbols of the realization of sense and thought.” (Hasan, Realism, 25-26)