For this reason and others modern psychology requires us to be cautious.
Among the others is the circumstance that perceptions are rarely pure.
Their purity consists in containing nothing else than perception; they
are mixed when they are connected with imaginations, judgments, efforts,
and volitions. How rarely a perception is pure I have already tried to
show; judgments almost always accompany it. I repeat too, that owing to
this circumstance and our ignorance of it, countless testimonies are
interpreted altogether falsely. This is true in many other fields. When,
for example, A. Fick says: “The condition we call sensation occurs in
the consciousness of the subject when his sensory nerves are
stimulated,” he does not mean that the nervous stimulus in itself is
capable of causing the condition in question. This one stimulus is only
a single tone in the murmur of countless stimuli, which earlier and at
the same time have influenced us and are different in their effect on
each man. Therefore, that single additional tone will also be different
in each man. Or, when Bernstein says that “Sensation, i.e., the
stimulation of the sensorium and the passage of this stimulation to the
brain, does not in itself imply the perception of an object or an event
in the external world,” we gather that the objectivity of the perception
works correctively not more than one time out of many. So here again
everything depends upon the nature and nurture of the subject.
Sensations are, according to Aubert, still more subjective. “They are
the specific activity of the sense organs, (not, therefore, passive as
according to Helmholtz, but active functions of the sense organs).
Perception arises when we combine our particular sensations with the
pure images of the spirit or the schemata of the understanding,
especially with the pure image of space. The so-called ejection or
externalization of sensations occurs only as their scheme and relation
to the unity of their object.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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