Alfred Binet

“ The sensations belong to the different organs of the senses—sight, hearing, touch, the muscular sense, &c. Whatever be the sense affected, one sensation has the same rights as the others, from the point of view of the cognition of external objects. It is impossible to distinguish them into subjective and objective, by giving to this distinction the meaning that certain sensations represent objects as they are, while certain others simply represent our manner of feeling. ”

“ From this point of view colour would exist as colour, outside our eyes, sound would exist as sound, and in a general way there would not be, in matter, any mysterious property left, since we should perceive matter as it is. ”

“ It is easy to see that we cannot represent to ourselves the inner structure of matter by using all our sensations without distinction, because it is impossible to bring all these sensations within one single and identical synthetic construction: for this they are too dissimilar. ”

“ It is not inconceivable that objects may act directly on our consciousness without taking the intermediary of our nervous system. Some authors, the spiritualists notably, believe in the possibility of disembodied souls, and they admit by implication that these souls remain in communication with the terrestrial world, witness our actions, and hear our speech. Since they no longer have organs of sense, we must suppose that these wandering souls, if they exist, can directly perceive material objects. ”

“ Other philosophers, as I have said, maintain that “things which have a real existence are the very things we perceive.” It is Thomas Reid who has upheld, in some passages of his writings at all events, the theory of instantaneous perception, or intuition. ”

“ This is a very unexpected interpretation, by which men of science have come to acknowledge the correctness of the common belief; they rehabilitate an opinion which philosophers have till now turned to ridicule, under the name of naïve realism. All which proves that the naïveté of some may be the excessive refinement of others.
To establish scientifically this opinion they batter down the theory of the specific energy of the nerves. ”

“ Several German authors have maintained in recent years, that if the nervous system intervenes in the perception of external objects, it is a faithful intermediary which should not work any change on those physical actions which it gathers from outside to transmit to our consciousness. ”

“ I have refuted this argument by showing that all our sensations without exception are subjective and equally false in regard to the of matter, and that no one of them, consequently, has any claim to explain the others.
Now, by a new interpretation, we are taught that all sensations are equally true, and that all faithfully represent the great . If they be all equally true, it is absolutely the same as if they were all false ”

“ The ingenious artifice they have devised consists in retaining only some of these sensations, and in rejecting the remainder; the first being considered as really representing the essence of matter, and the latter as the effects of the former on our organs of sense; the first being reputed to be true, we may say, and the second being reputed false—that is subjective, that is not representing the of matter. ”

“ It will be noticed that these three interpretations, the spiritualistic, the experimental, and the metaphysical, are in formal opposition with that which I have set forth earlier in these pages. They deny the supposition that the nervous system serves us as an intermediary with nature, and that it transforms nature before bringing it to our consciousness. ”

“ The physicists have more or less consciously perceived this, and, not being able to overcome by a frontal attack the difficulty created by the heterogeneity of our sensations, they have turned its flank. ”