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Man himself, so far as his animal nature is concerned, acts in the same way, and although he subsequently attains to the exercise of reasoning powers in virtue of the psychical reduplication of himself, the primitive faculty persists, and hence comes the mythical creation of a peculiar world of conceptions which give rise to all superstitions, mythologies, and religions.
People who hear painting, see music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though such notions are as old as literature.
By making sensation and feeling the preliminary step to thought, Leibnitz became the founder of that intellectualism which, in the system of Hegel, extended itself far beyond the psychological into the cosmical field, and endeavored to conceive not only all psychical phenomena but all reality whatsoever as a development of the Idea toward itself.
If we admit as I think we should that the patch of colour may be both physical and psychical, the reason for distinguishing the sense-datum from the sensation disappears, and we may say that the patch of colour and our sensation in seeing it are identical. This is the view of William James, Professor Dewey, and the American realists.
Now as man cannot serve two masters, so in the personal psychical household, the points of view which have been dethroned, as far as they will not unite with the newly acquired ones, must be killed, and ousted from their power. Most of all must this process be made effective if the development is taken up intensively in the shape of introversion. It must appear also in the symbolism.
But in no such spirit had he comprehended the Englishman's meaning, when finally that one came to the point; no cool disdain had coloured his attitude, but in the beginning hot indignation, in the end insensate rage.... He puzzled himself. That fit of passion had all the aspect of a psychical inconsistency impossible to reconcile with reason.
The dualism here is between knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called, objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective, psychical. There is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of knowing if it only wills to exercise it, which it is often strangely loath to do.
Each inner experience became therefore a series of so-called contents of consciousness. These contents can be described and must be analyzed into their elements. The basis of psychotherapy is therefore an analytic psychology which conceives the inner experience as a combination of psychical elements. But the final aim was the causal connection.
This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of those afflicted with the like." Would to Heaven, say we, thou hadst thought right to keep it secret! Who is there now that can read the five columns of Presentations in his Morning Newspaper without a shudder?
But how “mechanical happening” comes to have this marvellous inwardness, which we call sensation, feeling, perception, thought and will, which is neither mechanical nor derivable from anything mechanical; and, further, how physical and psychical can condition one another without doing violence to the law of the conservation of the sum of energy, is an absolute riddle.
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