Boris Sidis

“ The image is not felt as image, because it is not sensation or lacks the sensory coefficient, but because it possesses a qualitative character of its own. A sensation is not felt as such, simply because it lacks the character of another sensation. Thus sensation green is not experienced as the particular color sensation, because it has not the quale of sound or of pressure, but because the sensation green has a positive experience of its own. ”

“ We may have the perception of a comet which may never again come into our experience, and even if it should come, its coming is not due to our voluntary control; it is not we that can make the comet-experience come into our perceptual or sensory world with its sensory coefficient of external reality. ”

“ In fact, do they not bear on them more the mark of grim, pitiless, external necessity than any of the sensations coming from active muscle and joint? What about light, color, sound, smell, are not they sensations of external reality, even if sensations of resistance do not enter into their make-up? ”

“ Have not sensations of pain, of hearing, of color, or of smell as much reality as our sensations coming from muscle, joint, synovial membrane and articular surfaces? The acute, shooting, twinging pains of rheumatism, gout, tabes-dorsalis, the burning pains of meningitis, the excruciating throbs of megrim, the fine stabbing pains of toothache, the agony of angina, the sharp tormenting pains of facial neuralgia, and many other pains coming from different organs and tissues, are not they real and external? ”

“ Sensation carries along with it the reality of its stimulus. It i is not that the sense of reality is different from the sensation, it is given in the sensation itself. Similarly the percept and the sense of external reality are not two different things ”

“ The more systems of sensory elements are pressed into service, the stronger is the sense of external reality and the more assured is the reaction to the stimuli of the external environment.
"In the evolutionary process of man's adaptation to his environment he becomes extended in being and grows more developed, because of his social relations. Man presses into active service the systems of sensory elements of his fellow-beings. ”

“ There is another view which finds the fundamental difference between percept and image in what is and what is not common to all selves. Perceptual experience is common, while ideational experience is not common to all fellow-beings. I see the sun and other people can share it with me, while my image of the sun is experienced by myself. ”

“ On the other hand, we meet in psychopathology with a vast domain of phenomena, such as recurrent mental states, insistent ideas which force themselves on the patient's mind against his will. The recurrent mental states or the insistent ideas are far more stubborn and uncontrollable than any resistant sensory object. ”