“ Hence, a certain degree of complexity in an object is necessary to sustain our interest in it, if we exclude, as we must of course in these experiments, extraneous grounds of interest. Doubtless there are limits to the degree of complexity which we find interesting and which compels attention. A mere confused or disorderly complex, wanting altogether in unity, could hardly be expected to secure attention, if there is any truth in the principle, already recognized, that the definite has in ideation a distinct advantage over the vague. ”

“ A series of sounds given with such slowness that at one time, when passively heard, it fails to produce any impression of rhythm, may very well support the experience on another occasion, if the subject try to hold a specific rhythm form in mind and to find it in the series of sounds. In such cases attention creates the rhythm which without it would fail to appear. But we must not confuse the nature of this fact and imagine that the perception that the relations of a certain succession fulfil the the form of a rhythmical sequence has created the rhythmical impression for the apperceiving mind. ”

“ Only in the course of artistic development do we find the rigid, yet often unbalanced, symmetry relaxing into a free substitutional symmetry, and the formless narrative crystallizing into a really unified and balanced space form. The two antitheses approach each other in the 'balance' of the masterpieces of civilized art—in which, for the first time, a real feeling for space composition makes itself felt. ”

“ I have my first spatial experience when I have the thrill of satisfaction that comes from overtaking again, by means of my own inner activity, a sensation that has escaped me through an activity not my own. ”

“ It cannot be too strongly insisted on that the perception of rhythm is an impression, an immediate affection of consciousness depending on a particular kind of sensory experience; it is never a construction, a reflective perception that certain relations of intensity, duration, or what not, do obtain. If the perception of rhythm in a series of impressions were dependent on intellectual analysis and discrimination, the existence of such temporal limits as are actually found would be inconceivable and absurd. ”

“ The elements, in substitutional symmetry, are then simply means of introducing variety and action. As a dance in which there are complicated steps gives the actor and beholder a varied and thus vivified 'balance,' and is thus more beautiful than the simple walk, so a picture composed in substitutional symmetry is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus more beautiful, than an example of geometrical symmetry. ”

“ It seems to me that a logical system as such has to prefer the latter emphasis; we thus group mathematics beside logic and the theory of knowledge as a science of objects freely created for purposes of thought.
All logical knowledge is divided into Theoretical and Practical. The modern classifications have mostly excluded the practical sciences from the system, rightly insisting that no facts are known in the practical sciences which are not in principle covered by the theoretical sciences; it is art which is superadded, but not a new kind of knowledge. ”

“ When a critic dilates on his infallible detection of an indefinable somewhat, independent of material aspects of the verse and traceable to a mystic charm of 'thought,' it may very well be that the unanalyzed thing lies in just such dynamic and melodic conditions of rhythm and rhyme.
The most primitive characteristic of music is the ensemble. Savage music is often little else than time-keeping. When the social consciousness would express itself in speech or movement in unison, some sort of automatic regulation is necessary. ”

“ Whoever denies overindividual reality finds himself in the world of phenomena a solipsist and in the world of purposes a sceptic: there is no objective physical world, everything is my idea, and there is no objective value, no truth, no morality, everything is my individual decision. ”

“ Now this illusion of the open and filled space, for the finger-tip, is at every point similar to the illusion to which our time judgment is subject. If we pronounce judgment on a filled space or filled time while we are still actually living in it, it seems shorter than it really is, because, while we pay attention to the discrete sensations of external origin, we lose sight of the sensations of internal origin, which are the sole means whereby we measure lapse of time, and we consequently underestimate such stretches of time or space. ”

“ We should thus move in a circle, from which the only way out is to indicate the teleological character of all sciences by starting not with science but with the strictly teleological conception of life—life as a system of purposes, felt in immediate experience, and not as the object of phenomenalistic knowledge. ”

“ It is thus clear that we aim to extend our experimental work over the whole field of psychology and to avoid one-sideness. Nevertheless there is no absence of unity in our work; it is not scattered work as might appear at a first glance; for while the choice of subjects is always made with relation to the special interests of the students, there is after all one central interest which unifies the work and has influenced the development of the whole laboratory during the years of my direction. ”

“ In the ornamentation of objects the content or meaning of the design is already supplied by the merest hint of the symbol which is the practical motive of all ornamentation. The savage artist need, therefore, concern himself no more about it, and the form of his design is free to take whatever shape is demanded either by the conditions of technique and the surface to be ornamented, or by the natural æsthetic impulse. We have found that technical conditions account for only a small part of the observed symmetry in pattern, and the inference to a natural tendency to symmetry is clear. ”

“ Comparing all the results of this whole series of experiments on the suggestion of movement, we may conclude that movement, whether suggested by a whole line or part of a line, produces in terms of mechanical balance the same effect that the balanced object would produce after the completion of the suggested motion. This tendency to balance, it appears, lies at the basis of our preference; it often gives way, however, before considerations of space-filling, when the figure which on the scheme of mechanical balance is weaker, gains interest and so 'heaviness' by being brought nearer the center. ”

“ The most natural view would seem to be that the ease of apperception of the two objects together, and the tendency of the eye movement to begin on the occupied side, and to sweep across to the unoccupied, which we think of as deep, combine to give a feeling of pleasure and of balance. ”

“ When the division is too short, the imagination refuses to give it the proportionally greater importance that it would demand. When too long it is too near equality. In enjoying line, the division point is fixed, with shifts of attention from side to side. ”

“ Difference in number does not indicate difference in complexity. The sensation of four is not made up of four sensations of one. It is a unit as much as the sensation of one is.
There remains but one point to be elaborated. If number is not a quality of objects, but is merely a matter of attitude of the subject, we should not expect to find a very clear-cut line of demarcation between the different numbers except with regard to those things which we constantly consider in terms of number. ”

“ In the Zöllner figure, for instance, I have been able to notice the illusion fluctuate through a wide range, without eye-movements and without definitely attending to any point, during the fluctuation of the attention. My experiments with the tactual illusion have led me to the conclusion that it fluctuates even more than the optical illusion. Any deliberation in the judgment causes the apparent size of the filled space to shrink. The judgments that are given most rapidly and naïvely exhibit the strongest tendency to overestimation ”

“ For what persists from the reception of a rhythm impression and becomes the basis of future recognition and reproduction of it, is not the number of beats in a unit or sequence, nor the absolute or relative intensity of the components of the group; it is the quality of the groups as individuals, and the form of the sequence as a whole. The phrase and verse are as vividly conceived as the unit group ”

“ While walking in the street of an evening, if one fixates for a moment some bright light and then quickly turns the eye away, one will observe that a luminous streak seems to dart out from the light and to shoot away in either of two directions, either in the same direction as that in which the eye moved, or in just the opposite. If the eye makes only a slight movement, say of 5°, the streak jumps with the eye; but if the eye sweeps through a rather large arc, say of 40°, the luminous streak darts away in the opposite direction. ”

“ Can we, it may be asked, speak of psychical inhibition at all? Does one conscious state exercise pressure on another, either to induce it, or to expel it from the field? 'Force' and 'pressure,' however pertinent to physical inquiries, are surely out of place in an investigation of the relations between the phenomena of mind. Plainly a distinction has to be made if we are to carry over the concept of inhibition from the domain of nervous activity to the conscious domain. Inhibition cannot, it should seem, have the same sense in both. ”

“ I have always believed—a view I have fully discussed in my 'Grundzüge der Psychologie'—that of the two great contending theories of modern psychology, neither the association theory nor the apperception theory is a satisfactory expression of facts, and that a synthesis of both which combines the advantages without the defects of either can be attained as soon as a psychophysical theory is developed which shall consider the central process in its dependence, not only upon the sensory, but also upon the motor excitement. ”

“ But on the other hand, it is clearly impossible to find out how long the moment of excitation lasts, and therefore impossible to find out whether an excitation of the same duration and intensity is yet sufficient to affect consciousness if given when the eye is not moving. Unless the stimulation is proved to be thus sufficient, a failure to see it when given during an eye-movement would of course prove nothing at all. ”

“ There is no feeling and no volition which is not for the phenomenalist a content of consciousness and nothing else. There is, on the other hand, no perception and no idea which is not, or better, ought not to be for the voluntarist a means, an aim, a tool, an end, an ideal. In that real life experience of which the voluntarist is speaking, every object is the object of will and those real objects have not been differentiated into physical things under the abstract categories of mechanics on the one hand, and psychical ideas of them in consciousness on the other ”

“ Life as activity divides itself then into different purposes which we discriminate not by knowledge but by immediate feeling; one of them is knowledge, that is, the effort to make life, its attitudes, its means and ends a connected system of overindividual value. In the service of this logical task we connect the real attitudes and thus come to the knowledge of purposes: and we connect the means and ends—by abstracting from our subjective attitudes, considering the objects of will as independent phenomena—and thus come to phenomenalistic knowledge. ”

“ Continuity sometimes affords a convenient basis for unity and sometimes it does not. There is no standard of oneness in the objective world. We separate things as far as convenience or time permits and then stop and call that one which our own attitude has determined shall be one.
That we do associate a sensation with whatever idea we have previously connected it with, even though that idea be that of the number of objects producing it, is clearly shown by some experiments which I performed in the laboratory of Columbia University. ”

“ Meumann discussed in detail the characteristics of the rhythm of a simple series of sounds, of music, and of verse. He assumed that in the simple sound series we have rhythm in its barest form, and only the rhythmic synthetic activity is at work; while in music there is a content which to some extent prescribes unities, and the objective regularity of the rhythm is broken. In verse we have much more content, and the rhythmization is no longer regular in its temporal relations ”

“ The oval, most infrequent of all, appears only among the 'active' pictures, with the exception of landscape. It usually serves to unite a group of people among whom there is no one especially striking—or the object of whose attention is in the center of the picture, as in the case of the Descent from the Cross. It imparts a certain amount of movement, but an equable and regular one, as the eye returns in an even sweep from one side to the other. ”

“ It is the rule of the laboratory that everyone who carries on a special research has to be a subject in several other investigations. The reporting experimenters take the responsibility for the theoretical views which they express. While I have proposed the subjects and methods for all the investigations, and while I can take the responsibility for the experiments which were carried on under my daily supervision, I have left fullest freedom to the authors in the expression of their views. ”

“ While we have coördinated the knowledge of phenomena with the knowledge of purposes we have subordinated mathematics to the latter. As a matter of course much can be said against such a decision, and the authority of most mathematicians would be opposed to it. They would say that the mathematical objects are independent realities whose properties we study like those of nature, whose relations we 'observe,' whose existence we 'discover' and in which we are interested because they belong to the real world. ”

“ In very few cases is the vista behind an attractive or noticeable part of the picture, the fact showing that it acts in opposition to the latter, leading the eye away from it, and thus serving at once the variety and richness of the picture, and its unity. A pure diagonal would have line and vista both working at the extreme outer edge of the picture, and thus too strongly—unless, indeed, balanced by very striking elements near the other edge. ”

“ The uniformity of the law of sense perception is prejudiced if two senses, when affected by the same objective conditions, should report to consciousness diametrically opposite interpretations of these same objective facts. I may say at once, in advance of the evidence upon which I base the assertion, that the belief with which I began the experiments has been crystallized into a firm conviction, namely, that neither the illusion for open or filled spaces, nor any other optical illusion, is genuinely reversed for touch. ”

“ The quality of the sensation must not be confused with any quality of the object. If we had to depend entirely on the sense of touch and always remained passive and received sensations only when we were touched by something, there is no reason why we should not associate the idea of one with the sensation produced by two objects and the idea of two with that produced by one object—assuming that we could have any idea of number under such circumstances. The quality of a sensation from which number is inferred depends on several factors. ”

“ Whether there is a nerve wave, the reaction-time worker has as favorable an opportunity to determine as anyone, and we have a right to expect him to do something along this line. The relations of the form of the nerve impulse to the rhythm of vital action, to fatigue and to inhibition are awaiting investigation. Some of the most important unsettled points of psychology depend upon those aspects of neural activities which we ordinarily refer to as phenomena of inhibition, and which the psychologist is helpless to explain so long as the physiological basis and conditions are not known. ”