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The highest possibilities of imaginative cognition can be realized by supporting the aforesaid meditations by that which one might call “sense-free” thinking. Now when we formulate an idea based upon observations made in the physical sense-world, our thought is not free from sense-impressions.
"By the feel" is all that the Stoics really had to say in answer to this question. Just as Hume made the difference between sense-impressions and ideas to lie in the greater vividness of the former, so did they; only Hume saw no necessity to go beyond the impression, whereas the Stoics did.
On the other hand, although if a sensory nerve be divided anywhere short of the brain, we lose the corresponding class of sense impression, we yet speak of many sense-impressions, such as form and texture, as existing outside ourselves. How close then can we actually get to this supposed world outside ourselves? Just as near but no nearer than the brain terminals of the sensory nerves.
How quickly he would have recognized that, quite apart from sense-impressions, the animal, including man, possesses certain psychological resources, certain inspirations that are innate and not acquired!
It amounts to complete self-mastery by means of self-knowledge which allows nothing to be done heedlessly and mechanically and controls not merely recognized acts of volition but also those sense-impressions in which we are apt to regard the mind as merely receptive. "Self is the lord of self: who else should be the lord? With self well subdued, a man finds a lord such as few can find ."
Let us assume that a human being, with the present organs of sense, were to approach the Saturn condition as a spectator. None of the sense-impressions possible to him would confront him there except the feeling of warmth, or heat.
Certain sentences, formulæ, and single words can also be given as subjects for meditations, and in every case the means used will have the same object, namely: to detach the soul from sense-impressions and to stimulate it to an activity in which the impressions of the physical senses play no longer any part and in which the unfoldment of inner latent soul capacities becomes the essential.
Wordsworth once wrote of true poets who possessed "The vision and the faculty divine, Though wanting the accomplishment of verse." Let us venture to apply Wordsworth's terminology to the process already described. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the inner world and the other world."
Sense-impressions an animal certainly has; whether quite the same as man must remain uncertain. And sense-impressions enable an animal to accomplish much, especially in the realm of feeling; but language—never.
He carries his doctrine out to the bitter end in the conclusion that, since we have never had experience of anything beyond sense-impressions, and have no ground for an inference to anything beyond, we must recognize that the only external world of which we know anything is an external world built up out of sense-impressions.
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