Chapter 1 Conscious Human Action

Topic 1.0: The Question of Freedom

• Is the human being spiritually free in thinking and acting, or compelled by the iron necessity of purely natural law?
• Moralists support the idea of freedom and consider it our most precious possession while scientific thinkers oppose it considering freedom an illusion.
• The question of freedom is felt to be one of the most important questions for life, religion, conduct, and science by all but the most shallow thinkers.

Topic 1.1: Freedom of Indifferent Choice

• Freedom of Indifferent Choice consists of choosing, at one's pleasure, one or other of two possible courses of action.
• Superficial present day thinkers consider freedom an illusion because scientific research indicates we are always compelled by a definite reason to carry out just one action from among several possible actions.

Topic 1.2: Freedom Of Choice

• Freedom of choice is the ability to make a choice according to our own wants and preferences.
• This freedom is attacked because internal perception reveals we are not free to 'desire or not desire' something arbitrarily.

Topic 1.3: Free Necessity Of Own Nature

• Freedom is to exist and act from the pure necessity of our own nature.
• Freedom consists not in free decision, but in free necessity.
• In opposition to freedom is the view of Spinoza that everything is necessarily determined by external causes to exist and act in a fixed and definite manner, however complicated and many-sided this may be.
• Spinoza says the claim of freedom is false resulting from being ignorant of the causes that determine action.
• But this view in opposition to freedom does not take into consideration that we may become conscious of the reasons that cause us to act. There is a difference between knowing why I am acting and not knowing it.

Note: Free necessity implies that a thing is what it is; it has the elements essential to its specific nature. A necessary being produces but is not produced, it's existence is it's own essence and nature. Other things are contingent, their existence is given to them by an external cause.

Topic 1.4: Independent Of External Influences (having character)

• The human will depends on two chief factors, the motives and the character.
• An idea given from outside is made into a motive only if it is in accord with one's character.
• According to Eduard Von Hartman we are anything but free because we make a mental picture into a motive according to the necessity of our characterological disposition.
• What is completely ignored by Von Hartman's view opposed to freedom is the difference between motives allowed to influence only after being permeated by consciousness and motives followed without having clear knowledge of them.

Topic 1.5: Action Result Of Conscious Motive

• The question of free will must be linked with what other question?
• What is the difference between an action that is the result of a conscious motive and one that springs from blind urge?
• What does it mean to have knowledge of the reasons for one's action?
• We have distinguished between the doer and the knower but left out the one who matters most -- the knowing doer or one who acts out of knowledge.

Topic 1.6: Free When Controlled By Reason

• Freedom is to obey reason alone and not animal passions.
• Freedom is being able to determine one's life and action by purposes and decisions.
• But if without my cooperation, a rational decision emerges with the same necessity as hunger and thirst, freedom is an illusion.

Topic 1.7: Free To Do As One Wills

• To be free does not mean to be able to want (will) whatever one wills, but to be able to do as one wills.
  Or in the words of Robert Hamerling; “Man can certainly do as he wills, but he cannot want (will) as he wills, because his wanting (willing) is determined by motives."
• Without a determining motive the will is an empty faculty; it only becomes active and real through the motive.
• If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the "strongest" of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning.
• The primary question is not whether I can do a thing or not when a motive has worked upon me, but whether there are any motives other than those that compel me with absolute necessity.
• The question is not whether I can carry out a decision once made, but how the decision comes about within me.

Topic 1.8: Unconditioned Will

• What distinguishes humans from all other organic beings is based on rational thinking. Activity we have in common with other organisms.
• Rée says, The determining causes are not visible and therefore thought to be non-existent. The volition is the cause of the donkey's turning round, but they mistakenly believe it is itself unconditioned; it is an absolute beginning.
• Rée's opposition to freedom ignores human actions in which there is a consciousness of the motives.
• There are actions, not of the ass, but of human beings, in which between us and the action lies the motive that has become conscious.

Topic 1.9: Knowledge Of The Reason

• An action cannot be free if the doer does not know why they carry it out.
• Thinking activity must be recognized if we are to form a concept of knowledge about an action or anything else.
• When we know what thinking in general means, it will be easy to clarify the role that thinking plays in human action.
• It is thinking that gives to human action its characteristic stamp.

Topic 1.10: Action Springs From The Heart

• I am very far from calling only those actions "human" in the highest sense, which proceed from abstract judgment.
• Love, pity, and patriotism are driving forces for actions which cannot be analyzed away into cold concepts of the intellect. It is said that here the heart, the mood of the soul, hold sway.
• The heart, the mood of the soul* do not create the motives. They presuppose** them and let them enter.

*We have no word for Gemut in English. It points more to the totality of man's inner being than "heart" does.-William Lindeman
Michael Lipson prefers the word "sensibility": refined awareness and appreciation in matters of feeling.

**presuppose: 1. To require as a necessary antecedent or precondition 2. To assume some truth without proof, usually for the purpose of reaching a conclusion based on that truth.

Topic 1.11: Love Of Another

• Compassion appears within my heart when a mental picture of a person who arouses compassion appears in my consciousness.
• Love depends on the mental picture we make for ourselves of the loved one.
• The more idealistic these mental pictures are, the more blessed is our love.
• Thought is the father of feeling.

Topic 1.12: Perception Of Good Qualities

• Love opens the eyes for the good qualities.
• The perception of good qualities awakens love in the soul.
• One has love while others do not because one made a mental picture of the good qualities. The others do not have love because they lack the mental picture.

Chapter 2 The Fundamental Urge For Knowledge

Topic 2.0: "I" - World Separation

1. We seem born to be dissatisfied. And our thirst for knowledge is but a special instance of this dissatisfaction.
   
   • Every glance at Nature evokes in us a multitude of questions.
   • Nowhere are we satisfied with what Nature spreads out before our senses.
   • Everywhere we seek what we call the explanation of the facts.
2. We seek something more in things that exceeds what is immediately given. The fact that this something more exceeds what is directly given us splits our whole being into two parts.
   
   • We become conscious of our standing in opposition to the world, as independent beings.
   • The universe appears to us as two opposite parts: I and World.
   • But we never loose the feeling that we belong to the world, that there is a connecting link between it and us.
3. The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world.
   • The religious believer seeks in the revelation which God grants him the solution.
   • The artist seeks to embody in his material the ideas that are in his I.
   • The thinker seeks the laws of phenomena.
   • Only when we have made the world-content into our thought-content do we again find the unity.
4. The situation described presents itself to us in the conflict between the one-world theory, or monism, and the two-world theory, or dualism.
   
   • Dualism: pays attention to the separation between I and World which the consciousness has brought about.
     
     1. All its efforts consist in a vain struggle to reconcile these opposites.
     2. The "I", or Ego, belongs to the realm of spirit.
     3. The material objects and events which are perceived by the senses belong to the "World".
   • Monism: pays attention only to the unity and tries either to deny or to slur over the opposites.
     
     1. It denies spirit and becomes materialism.
     2. It denies matter in order to seek its salvation in spiritualism.
     3. Or it asserts that spirit and matter are indissolubly bound together.

Topic 2.1: Materialistic Conception

• Materialism attempts to explain the world with thoughts about matter and material processes.
• Thus it already has two different realms of facts before it: the material world and thoughts about it. It tries to explain thoughts by regarding them as material processes.
• The materialists have turned their attention away from the specific subject, their own I, and arrive at something vague and indefinite.

Topic 2.2: Spiritualistic Theory

• The pure spiritualist denies to matter all independent existence and regards it merely as a product of spirit (mind).
• It supposes the whole phenomenal world to be nothing more than a fabric woven by Mind out of itself. (original POF)
• What the "I" works through for itself spiritually, the sense-perceptible world is never to be found.
• It is as if the "I" would have to admit the world is a closed book to it, unless it could establish a non-spiritual relation to the world.

Topic 2.3: Absolute Idealism

• Fichte attempted to derive the whole world structure from the "I".
• What he has actually accomplished is a magnificent thought-picture of the world, without any content of actual experience.

Topic 2.4: One-sided Idealism

• When we reflect upon the "I", we perceive the activity of the "I" in the thinking elaboration of the world of ideas.
• By acknowledging nothing of spirit except the world of ideas, spiritualism becomes one-sided idealism.
• Instead of seeking a spiritual world through the world of ideas, idealism sees the spiritual world in the world of ideas itself.

Topic 2.5: Absolute Ignorance Of External World

• Materialism is right; world phenomena, including our thinking, are the product of material processes, but, conversely, matter and its processes are themselves a product of thinking.
• "The senses give us only effects of things, not accurate pictures. These effects include the senses themselves, along with the brain..."
• Lange's philosophy is nothing other than the Münchhausen story, who holds himself up in the air by his own pigtail

Topic 2.6: Indivisible Unity

• The third form of monism finds matter and spirit already united.
• How does the simple entity manifests itself in a two-fold way, if it is an indivisible unity?

Topic 2.7: Contrast Ourselves With The World

• The basic and original polarity confronts us first within our own consciousness.
• It is we who separate ourselves from the native ground of nature, and place ourselves as "I" in opposition to the world.

Topic 2.8: Nature's Activity Within

• It is true we have estranged ourselves from Nature.
• It is also true we feel we live within her and belong to her.
• It can only be her activity that pulsates also within us.

Topic 2.9: Know Nature Within

• Having torn ourselves from Nature, we must have retained something of her in our own being.
• We can only find nature outside us if we first know her within us.
• Without speculation about the interaction of nature and spirit (mind), we wish to probe the depths of our own being, to find the elements that we saved in our flight from nature.

Topic 2.10: Something More Than "I"

• The examination of our own being must bring us the solution to the riddle.
• We must come to a point where we can say to ourselves: Here I am no longer merely "I." There is something here that is more than "I."

Topic 2.11: Clarify The Facts

• I have so far been concerned not with scientific results but rather with a simple description of what we all experience within our own consciousness.

Topic 2.12: Record Facts Without Interpretation

• My intention has been to record the facts of everyday life.
• My concern is not how science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with the way we experience it in every moment of our daily lives.

Chapter 3 Thinking In The Service Of Understanding The World

Topic 3.0: Observation - Thinking

1. A billiard ball is struck.
   When I observe how a billiard ball, when struck, transfers its movement to another, I remain completely without influence over the course of this process.
   • Observe
     1. As long as I remain a mere observer, I can say something about the movement of the second ball only after it has taken place.
     2. I can rest content with the observation, and renounce all search for concepts.
   • Reflect
     1. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts about the occurrence.
     2. This is dependent on me.
     3. We feel constantly compelled to seek for concepts and conceptual connections, that stand in a certain relationship to the objects and events which are given independently of us.
2. What do we gain by finding the conceptual counterpart to an event?
   • Mere observation can follow the parts of a given event as they occur, but their connection remains obscure without the help of concepts.
   • Let us suppose, at the moment of billiard ball impact, my view is obstructed. As mere observer, I am ignorant of what happens next.
   • The situation is different if, before the obstruction of my view, I have discovered the concepts corresponding to the constellation of relationships. I can then predict what will happen, even if I can no longer observe it.
3. Observation and thinking
   The workings of common sense and the most complicated scientific research, rest on these two basic pillars of our spirit (mind). Whatever principle we wish to establish, we must show that we have observed it, or we must express it in the form of a clear thought that anyone can rethink.
   • Thinking
     1. Every philosopher who speaks of their basic principles must express them in conceptual form, and thereby use thinking.
     2. Thinking may play a secondary part in the origin of world phenomena, but in the origin of a view about them, it surely plays a major role.
   • Observation
     1. As for observation, we need it because of the way we are organized. Our thinking about a horse and the object "horse" are two things which for us emerge separately.
     2. Merely staring at a horse does not enable us to produce the concept "horse", and neither will mere thinking bring forth the corresponding object.

• Everything that enters the circle of our experience, we first become aware of through observation. Even thinking we must get to know first through observation.
• I observe the table, and I carry out the thinking about the table.
• Thinking as an object of observation differs essentially from all other objects.
• The observation of thinking is a kind of exceptional state.

• I am conscious that the concept of a thing is formed by my activity; while a feeling of pleasure is produced in me by an object in the same way as, for example, a change is caused in an object by a stone which falls on it.
• I learn nothing about myself by knowing the concepts which correspond to the observed change in a pane of glass by a stone thrown against it. But I do learn something about my personality when I know the feeling which a certain event arouses in me.

• The characteristic nature of thinking is just this, it is an activity directed solely on the observed object and not on the thinking personality.
• The thinker forgets thinking while actually doing in it. What occupies the attention is not thinking, but rather the object of thinking, that is being observed.
• While I am reflecting on the object, I am absorbed in it, my attention is focused upon it. To be thus absorbed is precisely to contemplate by thinking.

• I can never observe my present thinking; only afterward can I make the experiences, which I had during my thinking process, as the object of fresh thinking.
• The thinking that is to be observed is never the one active at the moment, but a different one.
• There are two things which are incompatible with one another: active productivity (bringing forth) and the contemplation of it (standing apart).

• Know thinking immediately and intimately.
• Know the characteristic features of its course, and how it occurs.
• Know directly the relevant context and the interrelationship between the single objects.
• Connection between concepts is clear through the concepts themselves.

• How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while carrying out a process of thinking, is irrelevant.
• I observe what motivates me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship.
• Observation shows that in linking one thought with another there is nothing to guide me but the content of my thoughts; I am not guided by any material processes in my brain.
• Whoever cannot overcome materialism lacks the ability to bring about the exceptional condition I have described.

• The only kind of Nature we could create without first having knowledge of it would be a Nature that does not yet exist.
• What is impossible for us with regard to Nature, namely, creating before knowing, we achieve in the case of thinking.
• We must resolutely plunge right into the activity of thinking, so that afterwards, by observing what we have done, we may gain knowledge of it.

• If we want to distinguish between thinking as it is before we become conscious of it, and thinking of which I am afterwards conscious, we should not forget that this distinction is a purely external one which has nothing to do with the thing itself.
• Here we are not talking of how my thinking looks to an intelligence different than mine, but of how it looks to me.
• In thinking we have a principle which subsists through itself.
• We can grasp thinking by means of itself. The question is, whether we can also grasp anything else through it.

• We must first look at thinking in a completely neutral way, without reference to a thinking subject or thought object.
• There is no denying that before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood.

• There are people who say we cannot determine with certainty whether our thinking is right or wrong, and therefore our starting point is a doubtful one.
• Thinking is a fact, and it is meaningless to speak of the truth or falsehood of a fact. I can, at most, be in doubt as to whether thinking is correctly applied.
• It is incomprehensible to me how anyone can doubt the rightness of thinking in itself.

Chapter 4 The World as Percept

Topic 4.0: Percept - Concept

• What a concept is cannot be said in words.
• When someone sees a tree, his thinking reacts to his observation, an ideal element is added to the object, and he considers the object and the ideal counterpart as belonging together.
• When the object disappears from his field of observation, only the ideal counterpart of it remains. This latter is the concept of the object.
• All the separate concepts combine to form a closed conceptual system in which each has its special place.
• Concepts cannot be gained through observation. Concepts are added to observation.

Topic 4.1: Concepts Cause And Effect

Observation

• Hear rustle from ditch and see herbage agitated.
• Turn towards the spot to learn by what this sound and motion are produced.
• See partridge flutter, curiosity satisfied.

Spencer's Explanation: Generalized relationship based upon countless experiences.

• Countless experiences of disturbances and movements.
• Generalized relationship between them.
• This disturbance an instance of this relationship.

A closer analysis shows that observation evokes thinking: It is thinking that first shows me how to link one separate experience to another.

Topic 4.2: Thinking Reference

• Human consciousness is the stage upon which concept and observation meet and become linked to one another.
• Thinking must never be regarded as a merely subjective activity. Thinking lies beyond subject and object.
• When we as thinking subject, refer a concept to an object, we must not regard this reference as something purely subjective. It is not the subject that makes the reference, but thinking.
• We think, and thereby embrace ourselves and the rest of the world. But at the same time it is by means of thinking that we determine ourselves as an individual confronting the things.

Topic 4.3: Conceptual Relationships Between Elements Of Observation

• What we would be aware of, before setting our thinking in motion, would be the pure content of (unthinking) observation. The world would then appear as a disconnected aggregate of objects of sensation : colors, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste and smell; also feelings of pleasure and pain.
• Thinking draws threads from one element of observation to another. It links definite concepts with these elements establishing a relationship between them.
• These relationships established by thinking on no account should be considered as merely subjective.

Topic 4.4: Correct Picture Of World

• The object of observation I call the "percept".
  
  • Objects of sensation in so far as the conscious subject apprehends them through observation.
  • My feeling becomes known to me by becoming a percept.
  • Thinking too, in its first appearance to our consciousness, may be called a percept.
• The naïve person regards their percepts, as they first appear, as things having an existence completely independent of themselves.
• They cling to this belief until they meet with other percepts which contradict the first.
• Every extension of the circle of our percepts compels us to correct our picture of the world.

Topic 4.5: Mathematical And Qualitative Dependence Of Picture

• Why are we compelled to continually correct our observations?
• My percept-picture changes when I change the place from which I am looking. Therefore the form in which it presents itself to me depends on a condition determined not by the object but by me, the perceiver.
• I should like to call the dependence of my percept-picture on my place of observation, "mathematical", and its dependence on my organization, "qualitative". The former determines the proportions of size and distances of my percepts, the latter their quality.
• The fact that I see a red surface as red -- this qualitative determination -- depends on the organization of my eye.

Topic 4.6: Percept Exists Only In Subjective Perception

• Our percept-pictures are at first subjective.
• When we know that a percept, for example the color red or a particular sound, is not possible without a specific structure of our organism, we may easily come to believe that it has no permanency apart from our subjective organization and that, apart from the act of perceiving it, it has no kind of existence.
• If I strip a table of its shape, extension, color, etc. — in short, everything that is only my percept — then nothing more remains. This view, followed up logically, leads to the opinion that the objects of my perceptions exist only through me, and only in as far, and as long as, I perceive them.
• No objection can be made to this claim as long as it remains merely a general consideration that the percept is partly determined by the organization of the subject.

Topic 4.7: Mental Picture: After-effect Of Observation

• I do not merely see a tree, but I also know that it is I who am seeing it.
• When the tree disappears from my field of vision, an after-effect of this process remains in my consciousness -- a picture of the tree.
• I should never have occasion to speak of mental pictures did I not experience them in the percept of my own self.

Topic 4.8: Mental Picture: Change In Ourselves Caused By Unknown Thing-In-Itself

• I am now able to distinguish these other objects (color, sound, etc.) which come before me, by calling them the outer world, while the content of my percept of my self (mental pictures) I call my inner world.
• The perception of a change in me, the modification my self undergoes, has been thrust into the foreground, while the object which causes this modification is lost sight of altogether. It has been said that we perceive not objects but only our mental pictures.
• Berkeleyan view: He limits my knowledge to my mental pictures because, in his opinion, there are no objects apart from mental picturing. What I take to be a table no longer exists, according to Berkeley, when I cease to look at it. My percepts arise directly through the power of God.
• Kantian view: Limits our knowledge of the world to our mental pictures, not because it is convinced that things cannot exist beyond these mental pictures, but because it believes us to be so organized that we can experience only the changes of our own selves, but not the things-in-themselves that cause these changes.

Topic 4.9: Mental Picture - Only What Our Organization Transmits To Us Of External Object

Physics, physiology, and psychology seem to teach us that for our percepts our organization is necessary, and that therefore we cannot know anything about external objects except what our organization transmits to us. Our perceptions are thus modifications of our organization, not things-in-themselves.

This train of thought has been characterized by Eduard von Hartmann as the one which must convince us that we can have direct knowledge only of our mental pictures.

Physics

• If I put my hand on a body, the molecules of my hand never touch those of the body directly, but there remains a space between body and hand.
• What I sense as the body's resistance is nothing but the effect of the force of repulsion which its molecules exert on my hand.
• I am completely external to the body and only perceive its effects on my organism.

Physiology

• The physiologist finds that, even in the sense organs, the effects of the external movement are transformed in the most manifold ways.
• The sense organs (eye, ear, touch) change the external stimulus and conduct it to the nerves.
• The nerves conduct it to the brain, then the brain transforms it into brain processes.
• Sensations appear as an effect in the soul with the brain their cause.

Psychology

• Hartmann says, "What the subject perceives, therefore, are always only modifications of his own psychical states and nothing else."
• Only single sensations can be transmitted to me by the brain.
• The soul combines the separate sensations into the mental picture of a trumpet.

Topic 4.10: Product Of Soul Transferred To External World

• According to this view the color is not present in the object perceived, nor in the eye, or in the brain.
• The color is produced in the soul by means of the brain process.
• The color is then transferred outward by the soul onto a body in the external world.
• There, upon this body, I finally believe myself to perceive the color.
• I believe that I recognize as a creation of my soul what the naïve person regards as existing outside him, in space.

Topic 4.11: External Percept Is Mental Picture

Naïve standpoint: The external percept, just as I perceive it, has objective existence.

• But now I observe that it disappears with my mental picturing, that it is only a modification of my own soul states. Do I still have the right to take it as the starting point for my considerations?
• From now on I must treat the table, which I used to believe affected me and produced a mental picture of itself in me, as itself a mental picture.
• I have no right to speak of a real eye but only of my mental picture of the eye. It is the same with nerve paths, the brain process, and the process in the soul itself.
• If, assuming the truth of the first circle of thought, I run through the steps of my act of cognition once again, the cognitive act reveals itself as a tissue of mental pictures that, as such, cannot act on each another.

Moreover there is a gap in the whole argument.

• The path of external observation ends with the process in my brain.
• The path of inner observation begins with the sensation, and continues to the construction of things out of the material of sensation.
• At the point of transition from brain process to sensation, the path of observation is interrupted.

Topic 4.12: Mental Picture Is Modification Of Real Eye And Real Hand

Investigation within the world of percepts can neither prove critical idealism, nor strip percepts of their objective character. Still less can the proposition "the perceived world is my mental picture" be claimed as obvious.

Schopenhauer:
The world is my mental picture. The world which surrounds us is there only as mental picture, that is, only in relation to the one who pictures it, which is ourselves.

Using Schopenhauer's expressions in his own sense, we could reply: My eye that sees the sun, my hand that feels the earth, are my mental pictures just as much as the sun and the earth themselves. That with this the whole theory cancels itself, is clear without further argument. For only my real eye and my real hand could have the mental pictures "sun" and "earth" as modifications of themselves; the mental pictures "eye" and "hand" cannot have them.

Chapter 5 The Act of Knowing

Topic 5.0: Knowledge Of Causes Independent Of Us

Critical idealist: Someone who believes that the whole perceived world is only an imagined one, a mental picture, and is in fact the effect upon my soul of things unknown to me.

• The real problem of knowledge then is not concerned with the mental pictures present only in the soul but with the things which are independent of us and lie beyond our consciousness.
• From this point of view, he is not concerned with the inner connection of his conscious percepts but only with their non-conscious causes which exist independently of him.
• If we do not see the things themselves but only their reflections, then we must learn indirectly about the nature of things by drawing conclusions from the behavior of the reflections.

Two critical idealist points of view:

• Absolute illusionism: I am confined to the world of my mental pictures and cannot escape from it. If I think of a thing as being behind my mental picture, then this thought too is nothing but a mental picture. The whole world seems a dream, in the face of which all striving for knowledge is simply meaningless.
• Transcendental realism: For others who feel entitled to argue from mental pictures to things, learning will consist in the investigation of these "things-in-themselves."

Topic 5.1: Indirectly Investigate Real Ego

Transcendental realism: How does the Ego produce the world of mental pictures out of itself? Convinced that the given world consists of nothing but mental pictures, his interest switches from this world to indirectly investigating the real soul which lies behind.

Illusionism: Denies altogether the existence of an Ego-in-itself behind the mental pictures, or at least holds this Ego to be unknowable.

If the things of our experience were "mental pictures", then our everyday life would be like a dream, and the discovery of the true state of affairs would be like waking.

• Night time sleep state: Night time dreams.
• Day time awake state: See through our night time dreams and refer them to the real relations of things, dreams caused by physical, physiological and psychological processes.
  
  • Perceiving dream state: “Waking conscious life” dreaming.
  • Thinking awakened state: See through our waking conscious life dreams and refer them to the real relations of things.

Topic 5.2: Assert results of thinking

Naive person: Accepts life as it is, and regards things as real just as they present themselves in experience.

• The first step beyond this naïve standpoint is to ask: "How does thinking relate to perception?"
• Between a percept and any kind of assertion about it there intervenes an act of thinking.

Topic 5.3: World Produces Thinking

Naïve consciousness: Treats thinking as something that has nothing to do with things, but stands aloof from them and contemplates them. The world is set and complete with all its substances and forces, and of this finished world we make a picture.

• What right have you to declare the world to be complete without thinking?
• Does not the world produce thinking in human heads with the same necessity as it brings forth the blossom from the plant?
• Set the plant before yourself and it connects itself, in your mind, with a definite concept. Why should this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom?

Topic 5.4: Process Of Becoming

Nonobjective opinion: The purely momentary appearance of a thing is the thing.

• The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of becoming.
• If I put the bud into water, I will get a very different picture of my object tomorrow.
• If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I will see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through countless intermediate stages.
• If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop.

Topic 5.5: Inseparable Existence Of Concept With Percept

Inadmissible to regard the sum of perceptual characteristics as the thing.

• It could be possible for a spirit to receive the concept at the same time as, and united with, the percept.
• It would have to regard the concept an existence inseparably bound up with the thing.
• The parabolic form of the trajectory of a stone, which we add to the phenomenon only by thinking, belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it does.
• Which elements do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all upon the way I arrive at my knowledge of these elements.
  

Topic 5.6: Isolate Sections Of World For Consideration

• Humans are limited beings. Only a limited part of the total universe can be given at any one time.
• It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.
• For us, however, it is necessary to isolate certain sections of the world and to consider them by themselves.
• Our understanding can grasp only single concepts out of a connected conceptual system.

Topic 5.7: Self-Perception, Self-Definition

This perceiving of myself must be distinguished from determining myself by means of thinking.

• Self-Perception: The perception of myself reveals to me a number of qualities which I combine into my personality as a whole. It does not take me beyond the sphere of what belongs to me.
• Self-Definition: Just as, by means of thinking, I fit any single external percept into the whole world context, so by means of thinking I integrate the percepts I have made of myself into the world process.

Individual colorings of the universal thinking.

• Our thinking is not individual like our sensing and feeling; it is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each single human being only because it comes to be related to his individual feelings and sensations. By means of these particular colorings of the universal thinking, individual men differentiate themselves from one another.
• There is only one single concept of "triangle". It is quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it is grasped in A's consciousness or in B's. It will, however, be grasped by each of the two in his own individual way.

Topic 5.8: We Are The All-One Being

Naive person: Believes himself to be the creator of his concepts. Hence he believes that each person has his own concepts.

• When we sense, feel (and also perceive), we are separate beings; when we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything.
• Desire for Knowledge: Through the fact the thinking in us reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to universal world existence, gives rise in us to the fundamental desire for knowledge.
• Task of Knowledge: To accomplish the balance, to unite the two elements, inner and outer, is the task of knowledge.
• The percept is thus not something finished and self-contained, but one side of the total reality. The other side is the concept.
• Act of Knowing: The act of knowing is the synthesis of percept and concept. Only percept and concept together make up the whole thing.

Topic 5.9: Activities of the Body

Schopenhauer wants to avoid making "abstract" thinking the bearer of unity in the world, and seeks instead something which presents itself to him immediately as real.

• Schopenhauer: "The act of will and the action of the body are not two things objectively known to be different, which the bond of causality unites; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same, but they are given in two entirely different ways: once quite directly and once in contemplation for the intellect."
• Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments to find in the human body the "objectivity" of the will. He believes that in the activities of the body he feels an immediate reality -- the thing-in-itself in the concrete.

Topic 5.10: Corresponding Intuition

Naïve consciousness: Thinking is abstract, without any concrete content; it can at most give us an "ideal" counterpart of the unity of the world, but never the unity itself.

• An observed object of the world remains unintelligible to us until we have within ourselves the corresponding intuition which adds that part of reality which is lacking in the percept.
• Just as the color-blind person sees only differences of brightness without any color qualities, so can the person without intuition observe only unconnected perceptual fragments.
• What appears to us in observation as separate parts becomes combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified world of our intuitions.
• The enigmatic character of an object consists in its separateness. But this separation is our own making and can, within the world of concepts, be overcome again.

Topic 5.11: Ideal Connections Of Percepts

In each field I gather new percepts, but the connecting medium which weaves through all these spatially and temporally separated percepts is thinking.

• Thinking alone links all these percepts to one another and shows them to us in their mutual relationship.
• We cannot speak of anything existing beyond what is directly perceived except what can be recognized through the ideal connections of percepts, that is, connections accessible to thinking.
• The way objects as percepts are related to the subject as percept --a relationship that goes beyond what is merely perceived-- is therefore purely ideal, that is, it can be expressed only by means of concepts.

Topic 5.12: Objective Percept

A percept emerges always as something perfectly definite, as a concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained in what is given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for thinking? The question concerning the "what" of a percept can, therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to this percept. From this point of view, the question of the subjectivity of percepts, in the sense of critical idealism, cannot be raised at all.

• Subjective: Only what is perceived as belonging to the subject.
• Objective: What appears for our perception to be external to the percept of myself as subject.
• Subjective Percept: The observation of the table has produced in me a modification which likewise persists. I retain the faculty to produce later on an image of the table. This faculty of producing an image remains connected with me. It is in fact the only thing which can justifiably be called the mental picture of the table.
• Objective Percept: Occurs when the object is present in the field of vision.

Confusing the subjective percept with the objective percept leads to the misconception contained in idealism -- that the world is my mental picture.

Chapter 6 Human Individuality

Topic 6.0: "I" as percept of myself as subject and "I" as part of the universal world process

• We certainly are not the external things, but we belong together with them to one and the same world. That section of the world which I perceive to be myself as subject is permeated by the stream of the universal cosmic process.
• "How do I get information about that tree ten feet away from me?" is utterly misleading. It springs from the view that the boundaries of my body are absolute barriers, through which information about things filters into me.
• I really am the things; not, however, "I" in so far as I am a percept of myself as subject, but "I" in so far as I am a part of the universal world process.

6.0 additional notes

Topic 6.1: Sense Impressions

• An electric shock is perceived by the eye as light, by the ear as noise, by the nerves of the skin as impact, and by the nose as a phosphoric smell.
• Those who, from the fact that an electrical process calls forth light in the eye, conclude that what we sense as light is only a mechanical process of motion when outside our organism, forget that they are only passing from one percept to another, and not at all to something lying beyond percepts.
• The physiological fact mentioned above cannot therefore throw any light on the relation of percept to mental picture. We must go about it rather differently.

Just as we can say that the eye perceives a mechanical process of motion in its surroundings as light, so we could equally well say that a regular and systematic change in an object is perceived by us as a process of motion. If I draw twelve pictures of a horse on the circumference of a rotating disc, reproducing exactly the attitudes which the horse's body successively assumes when galloping, I can produce the illusion of movement by rotating the disc. I need only look through an opening in such a way that, in the proper intervals, I see the successive positions of the horse. I do not see twelve separate pictures of a horse but the picture of a single galloping horse.

Topic 6.2: Conceptual Reference

• Conceptual Reference: The moment a percept appears in my field of observation, thinking also becomes active through me. An element of my thought system, a definite intuition, a concept, connects itself with the percept.
•  A mental picture is nothing but an intuition related to a particular percept; it is a concept that was once connected with a certain percept, and which retains the reference to this percept.
• I can convey the concept of a lion to someone who has never seen a lion. I cannot convey to him a vivid mental picture without the help of his own perception.

Topic 6.3: Individualized Concept

• The full reality of a thing is given to us in the moment of observation through the fitting together of concept and percept.
• Individualized concept: By means of a percept, the concept acquires an individualized form, a relation to this particular percept.

Topic 6.4: Experience

• The sum of those things about which I can form mental pictures may be called my total experience.
• Unthinking Traveler: A man who lacks all power of intuition is not capable of acquiring experience.
• Abstract Scholar: A man whose faculty of thinking is well developed, but whose perception functions badly owing to his clumsy sense organs, will just as little be able to gather experience.

Topic 6.5: Cognitive Personality 

• Mental Picture: Subjective Representative of Reality
• Cognitive Personality: All that is objective is given in percept, concept and mental picture.

Topic 6.6: Individual Ego

• Relate percept to our particular subjectivity, our individual Ego.
• Expression of this individual relationship is feeling, which manifests itself as pleasure or displeasure

 

Topic 6.7: Two-Fold Nature

• Thinking: Our thinking links us to the world.
• Feeling: Our feeling leads us back into ourselves and thus makes us individuals.
• It is only because we experience self-feeling with self-knowledge, and pleasure and pain with the perception of objects, that we live as individual beings.

Topic 6.8: True Individuality

• Universal Being: Ascend into the universal nature of thinking.
• Single Personality: Descend into the depths of our own life and allow our feelings to resound with our experiences of the outer world.
• True Individuality: One who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.

Topic 6.9: Making Mental Pictures

• Making mental pictures gives our conceptual life at once an individual stamp.
• Each one of us has his own particular place from which he surveys the world.

Making mental pictures gives our conceptual life at once an individual stamp. Each one of us has his own particular place from which he surveys the world. His concepts link themselves to his percepts. He thinks the general concepts in his own special way. This special determination results for each of us from the place where we stand in the world, from the range of percepts peculiar to our place in life.

Topic 6.10: Intensity of Feelings

• Our organization is indeed a special, fully determined entity.
• Each of us combines special feelings, and these in the most varying degrees of intensity, with his percepts.

Topic 6.11: Education Of Feelings

• Knowledge of things will go hand in hand with the development and education of the life of feeling.

Topic 6.12: Living Concept

• Feeling is the means whereby, in the first instance, concepts gain concrete life.

Chapter 7 Are There Limits To Cognition

Topic 7.0: Cognition

• Reality: We have established that the elements for the explanation of reality are to be found in two spheres: perceiving and thinking. It is due, as we have seen, to our organization that the full, complete reality, including our own selves as subjects, appears at first as a duality.
• Cognition: Cognition overcomes duality by fusing the two elements of reality, the percept and the concept gained by thinking, into the complete
  thing.
• World of Appearance: Manner in which the world presents itself to us, before it has taken on its true nature through cognition.
• Monism: The world is given to us as a duality, and cognition transforms it into a unity.
  
  • It is due to the nature of our mental organization that a particular thing can be given to us only as a percept. Thinking then overcomes this particularity by assigning to each percept its rightful place in the world as a whole.
  • As long as we designate the separated parts of the world as percepts, we are simply following, in this separating out, a law of our subjectivity.
• Dualism: Assumes that there are two worlds absolutely distinct from one another.
  
  • It is due, as we have seen, to our organization that the full, complete reality, including our own selves as subjects, appears at first as a duality.
  • Dualism rests on a false conception of what we call cognition. It divides the whole of existence into two spheres, each of which has its own laws, and it leaves these two worlds standing apart and opposed.
  • Dualism does not assume just that there are two sides of a single reality which are kept apart merely by our organization, but that there are two worlds absolutely distinct from one another. It then tries to find in one of these two worlds the principles for the explanation of the other.
• Thing-In -Itself:
  
  • Regard the sum of all percepts as the one part, and contrast with this a second part, namely, the things-in-themselves.
  • Dualism plays with concepts by constructing an artificial pair of opposites, but can gain no content for the second of these opposites (thing-in-itself), since such content for a particular thing can be drawn only from perception

 Topic 7.1: Assumed World Principle and Experience

• It is quite natural that a dualistic thinker should be unable to find the connection between the world principle which he hypothetically assumes ---the thing-in-itself--- and the things given in experience.
• Here the dualistic thinker usually asserts that the content of this concept is inaccessible to our cognition; we can know only that such a content exists, but not what it is that exists.
• A content for the hypothetical world principle can be arrived at only by borrowing it from the world of experience and then shutting one's eyes to the fact of the borrowing.
• The follower of a monistic world conception knows that everything he needs for the explanation of any given phenomenon in the world must lie within this world itself.
• What prevents him from reaching it can be only accidental limitations in space and time, or defects of his organization, that is, not of human organization in general, but only of his own particular one.

Topic 7.2: Egohoods Questions and Answers

• Things exist and act on one another according to laws which can be discovered through thinking, They exist in indivisible unity with these laws.
• Only when the Egohood has taken the two elements of reality which are indivisibly united in the world and has combined them also for itself, is cognitive satisfaction attained -- the I has then arrived at the reality once more.
• The I sets itself the problems of cognition; and moreover it takes them from an element that is absolutely clear and transparent in itself: the element of thinking.
• If we set ourselves questions which we cannot answer, it must be because the content of the questions is not in all respects clear and distinct.

Topic 7.3: Reconcile Familar Percepts and Concepts

• Our cognition is concerned with questions which arise for us through the fact that a sphere of percepts, conditioned by place, time, and our subjective organization, is confronted by a sphere of concepts pointing to the totality of the universe.
• My task consists in reconciling these two spheres, with both of which I am well acquainted.
• Here one cannot speak of a limit to cognition. It may be that, at any particular moment, this or that remains unexplained because, through our place in life, we are prevented from perceiving the things involved.
• The limits due to these causes are only transitory, and can be overcome by the progress of perception and thinking.

Topic 7.4: Ideal Reference of Percept to Objective Reality

• Dualists splits the two factors concerned in the cognitive process, namely percept and concept, into four:
  (1) the object in itself
  (2) the percept which the subject has of the object
  (3) the subject
  (4) the concept which relates the percept to the object in itself.
• Dualist-Two parts of the cognitive process
  (1) Outside consciousness: production of the perceptual object out of the thing-in-itself
  (2) Within consciousness: combination of percept with concept and the reference of the concept to the object

Dualist
The objectively real process in the subject by means of which the percept comes about, and still more the objective relations between things-in-themselves, remain for such a dualist inaccessible to direct knowledge; according to him, man can obtain only conceptual representatives of the objectively real.

Topic 7.5: Real principles in addition to ideal principles
The ideal principles which thinking discovers seem too airy for the dualist, and he seeks, in addition, real principles with which to support them.
Real Principles of the naïve realist:

• Objects
  
  • Proof of reality is if hands can grasp and eyes see object.
  • Nothing exists that cannot be perceived.
  • Everything which can be perceived exists.
  • Everything else, especially the world of ideas, is unreal or "merely ideal".
• Events
  
  • A thing can act on another only when a force actually present to sense perception issues from the one and seizes upon the other.

Topic 7.6: Real evidence of senses in addition to ideal evidence
Real evidence of senses of naïve realism:

• God: God must appear in the flesh, and little value is attached to the testimony of thinking. Proof of divinity testified by the senses such as changing water into wine.
• Cognition: Things make an impression on the soul, or send out images which enter through our senses.
• Science: Exact description of the content of perception.

Concepts provide ideal counterparts of percepts, but have no significance for the things themselves. For the naïve realist, only the individual tulips which he sees (or could see) are real; the single idea of the tulip is to him an abstraction, the unreal thought-picture which the soul has put together out of the characteristics common to all tulips.

Topic 7.7: Vanishing Percepts and Ideal Entities
The tulip I see is real today; in a year it will have vanished into nothingness. Thus this theory of the world find itself in the position of seeing its realities arise and perish, while what it regards as unreal ---the idea--- in contrast with the real, persists. Therefore naïve realism is compelled to acknowledge, in addition to percepts, the existence of something ideal. It must admit entities which cannot be perceived by the senses.

These hypothetical realities are the invisible forces by means of which the sense-perceptible objects act on one another.

• Heredity: Works on beyond the individual and is the reason why a new being is similar to parent.
• Life-principle permeating the organic body
• Soul
• Divine Being

Topic 7.8: Perceptible Reality and Imperceptible Reality

Metaphysical realism:

• Ascribes a form of existence (perceptible existence) to a sphere where the only means of making any assertion about such existence, namely, sense perception, is lacking.
• Constructs, in addition to the perceptible reality, an imperceptible reality which it conceives on the analogy of the perceptible one.
• Metaphysical realism is of necessity dualistic.
• The real world is composed of the objects of perception which are in ceaseless flux, arising and disappearing, and of imperceptible forces which produce the objects of perception, and are the things that endure.

Topic 7.9: Sum of Percepts and Laws of Nature
If we are to avoid the contradiction of imperceptible percepts, we must admit that the relationships which thinking establishes between the percepts can have no other mode of existence for us than that of concepts.

Monism

• The world presents itself to us as the sum of percepts and their conceptual (ideal) relationships.
• Requires the principle of perceivability for percepts and that of conceivability for the relationships between the percepts.
• Can admit no third sphere -- in addition to the world of percepts and the world of concepts -- in which both the so-called "real" and "ideal" principles are simultaneously valid.
• Combines one-sided realism with idealism into a higher unity.

Naïve realism: The real world is an aggregate of perceived objects (percepts).
Metaphysical realism: Not only percepts but also imperceptible forces are real.
Monism: Replaces forces by ideal connections which are gained through thinking. The laws of nature are just such connections. A law of nature is in fact nothing but the conceptual expression of the connection between certain percepts.

Topic 7.10: Separation and Reunion of “I” into World Continuum
Monism never finds it necessary to ask for any principles of explanation for reality other than percepts and concepts. In the perceptual world, as it presents itself directly to perception, it sees one half of the reality; in the union of this world with the world of concepts it finds the full reality.

Limits to cognition for naïve and metaphysical realism

• Both see in the contents of the soul only an ideal representation of the real world.
• What exists outside the subject is something absolute, founded in itself, and what is contained within the subject is a picture of this absolute, but quite external to it.
• The completeness of the cognition depends on the greater or lesser degree of resemblance between the picture and the absolute object.
• A being with fewer senses than man will perceive less of the world, one with more senses will perceive more. The former will accordingly have a less complete knowledge than the latter.

Since it is only through the subject that the whole appears cut in two at the place between our percept and our concept, the uniting of those two gives us true cognition.

Monism: Our own cognition suffices to answer the questions put by our own nature.

• The manner in which the world continuum appears to be rent asunder into subject and object depends on the organization of the perceiving being.
• The object is not absolute, but merely relative, with reference to this particular subject.
• Bridging over the antithesis, therefore, can again take place only in the quite specific way that is characteristic of the particular human subject.
• As soon as the I, which is separated from the world in the act of perceiving, fits itself back into the world continuum through thoughtful contemplation, all further questioning ceases, having been but a consequence of the separation.

Topic 7.11: Sum of Effects and Underlying Causes
Inductive inference is the method underlying modern metaphysical realism.

Inductive inference

• Inference from a sum of effects to the character of the underlying causes.
• We believe that we can understand the situation well enough from a sufficiently large number of instances to know how the inferred causes will behave in other instances.
• We shall be obliged to modify its results if further observation yields some unexpected element.
• The metaphysical realist asserts that this knowledge of causes, though conditional, is nevertheless quite sufficient for practical life.

Anything inferred from past percepts will be somewhat modified by each subsequent percept. The character of the metaphysical thus obtained by inductive inference, therefore, is only relatively true, since it is subject to correction by further instances.

Topic 7.12: Subjective and Objective World Continuum
The form which the metaphysical realist nowadays gives to his things-in-themselves is obtained by inductive inferences. Through considerations of the process of cognition he is convinced of the existence of an objectively real world continuum and a "subjective" world continuum.

Objective real world continuum: Nature of this reality is determined by inductive inferences from percepts.
Subjective world continuum: Cognizable through percepts and concepts.