Hermann Ebbinghaus

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I must doubt, however, if truth is present where such analogies are worked out, for nothing can be less clear than the assertion that truth has unity. Mind is not everywhere in its totality, neither in the brain nor in the whole world. It is partly here, partly there; as seeing mind it is in the occipital convolutions of the brain, as hearing mind in the temporal convolutions. Thus we are forced, if we regard the brain as the mind’s tool, to regard the mind as an entity possessing spatial form. If we reject this conclusion, we must also reject the premise that the brain is the mind’s tool. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We saw that practical belief is not altogether independent of experiential belief. Neither is the latter independent of the former. When two theories agree equally well with experiential facts, we accept the one that is simpler. Not because we know that it is nature’s obligation to proceed in the simplest manner possible, and that therefore the simpler theory is more likely to be correct; but because our practical needs compel us to accept a simpler theory whenever we can. We believe the Copernican theory of the solar system and reject the Ptolemaic system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing but the fact that society, if it can do so, will punish its members for certain deeds. Why should a belief in universal causation prevent society from punishing its members? Bismarck writes in a letter to his sister: “It is not the wolf’s fault that God has created him as he is. That does not prevent us from killing him whenever we can.” Holding a person responsible, punishing or rewarding him, does not lose its meaning if we regard his actions as being determined by causes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Something is, indeed, confirmed and strengthened by growing experience; but it was believed before it was known, and cannot properly be called an additional belief. Much that has been believed for some time is recognized as unreal. That apparent errors have to be recognized as truths happens much more rarely. Experience makes a man more and more skeptical, cautious. This is of great advantage to him in his adaptation to the world, and higher institutions of learning to a large extent have their purpose in aiding the young to develop cautious, critical habits of thinking. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Consciousness in which the idea of I is rather pronounced is commonly called self-consciousness.
It is plain enough that thinking of the other half of the world, other than the self, is also facilitated by such names as “the world,” “the external world.” But the concept of the external world does not easily attain the unity of the concept of self, because the experiences referred to are too changeable in comparison with those referred to by I. We speak of the external world chiefly in order to distinguish it from the self, not because of the unity of its conception. ”

“ The philosopher defines freedom as the possession of the power to act in accordance with one’s inherent nature, independent of external causes. Because of the association between the defined and the defining words, the latter keep the defined word from being used wrongly, by entering consciousness when the defined word happens to be used in an improper connection. It is true that, in order to insure constancy of meaning, the defining words, too, should be defined again by others, and so on. A perfect definition is therefore an ideal which can be approached, but never reached. ”

“ Misfortune of any kind has a marvelous belief-creating power, because it constantly revives ideas of remedying the misfortune. “Whoever has lived among people,” says Spinoza, “knows how full of wisdom they feel, insulted if any one should offer any advice, as long as their affairs are prosperous. But let misfortune overpower them, and they are willing to ask any one’s advice, and to accept it, however senseless and ill-considered it may be.” ”

“ Sensations, images, perceptions, and so on, give rise to feelings, not only on account of what they are, but also and indeed chiefly because of their manner of connection, of succession, and of spatial relation. Colors which we regard as most beautiful separately may compose a carpet whose color scheme we dislike and call inharmonious; on the other hand, the most uninteresting gray dots may compose a beautiful design. A piece of music is beautiful not alone because of the clearness of the single tones, but chiefly because of the relations of these tones in melody, harmony, and rhythm. ”

“ That man is immeasurably superior to animals cannot be doubted. But human superiority does not consist in the possession of a higher faculty—let us call it reason—in no way dependent on the lower, animal faculties, to which it is added as a jeweler’s tools might be added to a blacksmith’s tools. The difference between the animal mind and the human mind is simply this: that the imaginative anticipation of possible experiences of the future is brought about in the human mind by means of more abstract and therefore more comprehensive ideas than in the animal mind. ”