The green (A) of the tree is not only adjoined to the presence of the sun (B), but also to the deflection of the needle (X), by my optic nerve. Familiarising intermediary connections to-day by motions, to-morrow by some other means, is the business of the special sciences, and can only disturb and obscure a general discussion. What should we say of a cosmology from a pharmaceutical point of view? In principle, this very thing is done, it seems to me, when physical augers and saws are employed in all fields of work, as is universally the case.
So much for the juxtaposition of motion and feeling. Perhaps I alone am right, perhaps I alone am wrong.
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According to my conception accordingly "material" processes are not "accompanied" by "feelings," but are the same (A B C …); only the relation in which we consider them makes them at one time physical elements and at another time feelings.
The relation in which "percepts" and "feelings" as distinguished from "sensations" stand to sensations, is not clear to me. I am much inclined to regard these feelings as a species of sensation (co-ordinate with sensations). How the representative percepts of imagination and memory are connected with sensations, what relation they bear to them, I dare venture no opinion. The relation of α β γ … to A B C … is the point regarding which I do not feel sufficiently sure. Regarding A B C … (world of sense in its objective and subjective significance) I believe I am clear.
Dr. Carus in a private letter to me says: "It almost seems as if you transform all A B C … series into the corresponding α β γ … series."
This is not the case. I designate by α β γ … representative percepts (not sensations), and say simply that A B C …, the same A B C …, play, according to circumstances, now the rôle of physical elements, now the role of sensations. I call A B C …, therefore, elements, pure and simple.
Mine is not the Berkeleian point of view. The latter has been mistakenly attributed to me time and again, the separation that I make of A B C … from α β γ … not having been sharply discriminated and it not having been borne in mind that I call A B C … alone sensations, not however α β γ. Clifford, with his "mind-stuff," approaches very near to Berkeley.
Monism, as yet, I cannot thoroughly follow out; because I am lacking in clearness with regard to the relation of α β γ … to A B C …, which can only be supplied by further physiologico-psychological investigations; but I believe that the first step towards a competent monism lies in the assertion that the same A B C … are both physical and psychical elements. As regards the psychical "accompanying" the physical, the question How? continually recurs. Either they are two incompatible things (Dubois) or their relation is bound up in a third thing ("thing-of-itself"). By viewing the matter as two sides of the same thing, not much more is gained, to my mind, than a momentary satisfaction.
All non-monistic points of view are, in my opinion, artificial constructions, which arise by investing with very far-reaching extensions of meaning psychological or physical special-conceptions, which have a limited value, applicable only within the department in question for the elucidation of the facts of that department. The overvaluing of psychological conceptions leads to spiritualistic systems, the overrating of physical conceptions to materialistic systems. Naturally in the latter systems motion plays a great rôle; for through a mistaken conception of the principle of energy, people have come to believe that everything in physics can be explained by motion. But explanations by motions have, as a matter of fact, nothing to do with the principle of energy. The majority of physicists, it is true, believe and disseminate this opinion. If, when a physicist speaks of motion and nothing but motion, the question is asked What moves? in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred nothing palpable or demonstrable is brought forward in answer, but hypothetical atoms or hypothetical fluids are adduced which execute motions still more hypothetical. Even in the domain of physics itself, the business of which is to proceed from the sensory and to return to the sensory, I can regard these "motions" at best only as provisorily tolerated intermediaries of thoughts, that have no right to be ranked on equal terms with reality, let alone placed above it.