Hermann Ebbinghaus

“ A particularly strong factor in our life of feeling is the frequency of recurrence of a situation. The most beautiful music suffers from being played at every concert and on every street, the most delicious dish from being put on the table every day. On the other hand, a bitter medicine gradually loses its unpleasantness, an unpleasant situation becomes indifferent to a person whose profession compels him to face it frequently. As the unchanging is at a disadvantage in our life of perception, so is the recurrent in our life of feeling. ”

“ Who could, with even tolerable exactness, describe in its gradual course the supposed overlaying or sinking or crumbling of ideas? Who can say anything satisfactory about the inhibitions caused by series of ideas of different extent, or about the disintegration that a firm complex of any kind suffers by the use of its components in new connections? Everybody has his private “explanation” of these processes, but the actual conditions which are to be explained are, after all, equally unknown to all of us. ”

“ Whether, for a certain group of observations, the curve has a more steep or more flat form depends on the nature of those observations. The more exact they are, the more will they pile up around the central value; and the more infrequent the large deviations, the steeper will the curve be and vice versa. For the rest the law of formation of the curve is always the same. Therefore, if a person, in the case of any specific combination of observations, obtains any measure of the compactness of distribution of the observations, he can survey the grouping of the whole mass. ”

“ But religion is, naturally and unfortunately, a mighty weapon in the hands of the masters defending their positions against the slaves. Religion gives peace, quiescence, to the human heart. Religion perhaps teaches that the splendor of wealth is insignificant, worthless; that the poor are better off in the future, eternal life, than those who are now rich. Religion perhaps even teaches that those who do not believe this will be severely punished in the next life. This is not the original meaning of the doctrine—that the wretched should remain wretched ”

“ It is customary to appeal for the explanation of this form of association to the nature of the soul. Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject. What is more natural than that this unitary being should bind together in a definite way the contents of his acts, themselves also unified? Whatever is experienced simultaneously or in immediate succession is conceived in one act of consciousness and by that very means its elements are united and the unison is naturally stronger in proportion to the number of times they are entwined by this bond of conscious unity. ”

“ It is true that he proceeds: “néanmoins...il y a quelque vérité dans l’opinion qui veut que la mémoire non seulement se fatigue mais s’oblitère” (nevertheless...there is some truth in the opinion that memory not only becomes fatigued but that it disappears”) , but he explains this by the theory that one memory might hinder another from appearing. “Si un souvenir ne chasse pas l’autre, on peut du moins prétendre qu’un souvenir empeche l’autre et qu’ainsi pour la substance cérébrale, chez l’individu, il y a un maximum de saturation.” ”

“ In order to give the greatest possible encouragement, we tell him that it is his free will to do good that determines our estimation of his social value, no matter whether he succeeds or not. However, the question whether a man’s will is to be called good or bad, can be answered only by pointing out a social purpose, the furtherance of the welfare of the whole. Without this the will to do good, the feeling of duty, is like the rope by means of which Münchhausen descended from the moon. ”

“ To a child, who knows little and accomplishes little, his inability, his helplessness, does not give much concern. It is the prevalent, one may even say normal, condition of his life, and therefore scarcely gives rise to unpleasant feelings. But the experienced adult, in the full consciousness of his knowledge, of the advantage which this gives to him, strives to know everything, to extend his power over everything. And he is constrained to learn that he will never come near this end. His prescience, the source of so much pleasant feeling, becomes thus a source of immense unpleasantness. ”

“ But in waking life this thought is altogether devoid of reality. In comparison with the reality of my present experience and of my ideas of the limits of engineering, of the low temperature of interstellar space, and so on, that thought of a journey in a shell immediately makes me conscious of the vivid idea of unreality. ”

“ If mental life is really nothing but a machinery of ideas, a coöperation and opposition of masses of ideas, what is such a thing as religion? Is it a small complex of true and rational ideas, to which is added a large complex of superstitious fables, invented, or at any rate cultivated, by priests and princes, in order to keep men under their authority? So low a valuation of religion is scarcely possible. Or, what is art? ”

“ Why should a low level of development of human life in all be preferable to a vastly higher development of a few and a still lower one of all the rest? And those youths who are not yet masters, but feel confident of being destined to become masters, readily applaud. There are, however, at least two objections to this view. First, we must remember that all human thought and feeling is determined by the laws of association. The masters cannot help seeing the wretched condition of the slaves, and must thus suffer themselves, although much less. ”

“ It is not even necessary to be a master in order to be a prophet. A strong voice, significant gesticulation, and impressive speech are sufficient to guide the belief of the masses of the people. When everybody holds{159} a certain belief and gives expression to it, no member of the crowd can escape the influence of the constant repetition of the thought. I cannot help believing what my friends or my associates in a profession believe. Even if I begin to reflect on the reasonableness of accepting as a truth what I have merely often heard, I can hardly free myself of the belief. ”

“ Thinking is not so easy while we are performing a gymnastic feat or walking at a rapid gait. When we are listening to difficult music, we shut our eyes. When a momentous question, a dangerous task, presents itself, we are in danger of losing our head; that is, being occupied by ideas of the magnitude of the event, we fail to become conscious of thoughts and memories of the simplest and most ordinary kind. ”

“ Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short. For thousands of years it has existed and has been growing older; but in the earlier part of this period it cannot boast of any continuous progress toward a riper and richer development. In the fourth century before our era that giant thinker, Aristotle, built it up into an edifice comparing very favorably with any other science of that time. But this edifice stood without undergoing any noteworthy changes or extensions, well into the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. ”

“ Certainly one thing which stands in the center of all mental life seems entirely incomprehensible as the result of a mere mechanics of ideas, that is, that unity of mind without which we could not speak of personality, of character, of individuality, without which we could not call one man haughty and another humble, one good and another bad, one noble and another base. ”

“ Yet popular thought has, on the other hand, always emphasized the unity of mind. Those who regard its unity as the chief characteristic of mind have for centuries sought for the single point in the brain where the mind can be said to have its seat. If it were distributed all through the brain, would it not be possible to cut the mind into pieces by simply cutting the brain? ”

“ One may call this, in distinction from the authoritative belief, practical or emotional belief.
Every one believes in his own destiny. Every mother believes in her son. Napoleon believed in his star. A general who doubts if he is going to win the impending battle has already half lost it. Can he prove it, that is, can he interpret what he sees and what is reported to him in such a manner that the idea of his winning the battle cannot appear in his mind without the idea of reality? ”

“ We speak of a bridge boldly swinging across the river, a mountain rising proudly to the clouds, a beam resting heavily on columns, lines crowding together or leaning against each other, tones hiding before and seeking each other. We attribute contents of the I to the things which we perceive; we give them mental life, feeling, and conduct, and experience in consequence further responses of our own life of feeling. ”

“ Such concepts as acceleration, pitch of tone, irrational number, atomic heat, justice, bliss, would be impossible without language. To the invention of such abstract concepts mankind owes its subjugation of nature. It is difficult to think of the exact manner in which bodies fall when they are dropped; some fall slowly, others with great velocity, some do not fall at all, but rise. But think of them as being in space from which the air has been exhausted, and apply the concept of acceleration. ”

“ We have mentioned in an earlier chapter the universal desire to imagine the world as being under the power of innumerable demons. The consciousness of the self thus leads naturally to the thought of a demon who inhabits the human body. When a person under ordinary conditions is conscious of the I, there is no time for its content to unfold itself to any considerable extent. Usually one small group of ideas enters consciousness, even when I ask myself the question as to what I am: ideas of a certain visual appearance, a certain position in society, a certain age, certain aims in life. ”

“ The strongest people is one whose motto is: all for one, each for all; sooner or later it will overthrow the other. If this does not happen, the internal stress is likely at some time to become too great: the slaves rise and sweep the masters away. In either case the existing society is destroyed.
Notwithstanding the happiness which our foreseeing activity gives us, it carries with it three classes of evils: resulting from the limits of our knowledge, from the limits to which our activity is subject, from the contrast and enmity between social classes. ”

“ Although the kinds of content of imagery do not differ from those of perception, imagery differs from perception, as a rule, in such a characteristic manner that in ordinary life we are not likely to mistake an image for a percept or a percept for an image. The imagined sun lacks brilliancy. Its imagined heat does not burn. A glowing match, perceived, surpasses those images. ”

“ An infant has no consciousness of either reality or unreality. He has simply conscious states, without any such distinction. But he cannot fail to learn the distinction. He is hungry. He cries. He becomes conscious of reproduced former experiences of food and of the mother bringing the food. And, indeed, the door opens, the mother enters with the food, very similar to the imagined mother, and yet differing in vividness, in permanence, in number of details. ”