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Updated: May 11, 2025
Spontaneous syntheses arise in it which are not mathematical averages of the images it receives from sense; they are effects of diffused excitements left in the brain by sensations. These excitements vary constantly in their various renewals, and occasionally take such a form that the soul is surprised by the inward vision of an unexampled beauty.
And yet, though we thus justify contemporary writing, we can but think, that, after long ages of piecemeal and bon-mot literature, we shall at length return to serious studies, vast syntheses, great works. The nebulous world of letters shall be again concentred into stars.
Before the complexity of an organism and the practically infinite multitude of interwoven analyses and syntheses it presupposes, our understanding recoils disconcerted. That the simple play of physical and chemical forces, left to themselves, should have worked this marvel, we find hard to believe.
Even if it were possible that the mental content was gained through mere experience, that comparisons, syntheses, and abstractions were formed simply according to the laws of association, and that these were sublimed and refined to general ideas, and could grow into axioms of logic and of geometry, or crystallise into necessary and axiomatic principles—none of which can happen—yet it would always be a knowledge of something.
The idea of nature and the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of the same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially identical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly into the other. "To perceive all the influences of all the points of all bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object."
They consequently attribute whatever value their genial syntheses may have to the object as they picture it. The gods have, they fancy, the aspect and passions, the history and influence which their myth unfolds; nature in its turn contains hypostatically just those laws and forces which are described by theory.
Man is what experience has made him; hence, in education, by preparing a suitable structure of experiences, it is possible to build up the man. A conception not less materialistic than that which presented itself for a moment before the marvelous progress of organic chemistry, when the series of syntheses succeeded that of analyses.
For now we are definitely brought face to face with the quite unanswerable question, How, from all this homogeneity and unity of the ultimate particles and forces, can we account for the beginnings of the diversity which is so marked a characteristic of this world? Whence came the causes of the syntheses to higher unities, the reasons for the combination into higher resultants of energy?
From him we might have hoped for a work expressing the deepest conflicts of the human soul, the highest thoughts of his time on human and divine things in a word, one of those supreme syntheses like the 'Divine Comedy' or 'Faust. Instead of which he goes to work like the visual artists of his own day, not caring for originality in our sense of the word, simply reproducing a familiar circle of figures, and even, when it suits his purpose, making use of the details left him by his predecessors.
Their separating and uniting, their relations to one another, their grouping into unities, their “syntheses,” are not automatic permutations and combinations, but express the activity of a thinking intelligence. Not even the simplest actual synthesis comes about of itself, as psychologists have shown by a neat illustration.
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