In this connection it should not be forgotten that the retention of
these images is somewhat pedantic and depends upon unimportant things.
In the city hall of Graz there is a secretary with thirty-six sections
for the thirty-six different papers. The name of the appropriate journal
was written clearly over each section and in spite of the clearness of
the script the depositing and removing of the papers required certain
effort, inasmuch as the script had to be read and could not be
apprehended. Later the name of the paper was cut out of each and pasted
on the secretary instead of the script, and then, in spite of the
various curly and twisted letters, the habitual images of the titles
were easily apprehended and their removal and return became mechanical.
The customary and identical things are so habitual that they are
apprehended with greater ease than more distinct objects.
Inasmuch as we can conceive only on the basis of the constancy and
similarity of forms, we make these forms the essence of experience. On
the other hand, what is constant and similar for one individual is not
so for another, and essences of experience vary with the experiencer.
“When we behold a die of which we can see three sides at a time, seven
corners, and nine edges, we immediately induce the image or schema of a
die, and we make our further sense-perception accord with this schema.
In this way we get a series of schemas which we may substitute for one
another” (Aubert). For the same reason we associate in description
things unknown to the auditor, which we presuppose in him, and hence we
can make him rightly understand only if we have named some appropriate
object in comparison. Conversely, we have to remember that everybody
takes his comparison from his own experience, so that we must have had a
like experience if we are to know what is compared. It is disastrous to
neglect the private nature of this experience. Whoever has much to do
with peasants, who like to make use of powerful comparisons, must first
comprehend their essential life, if he is to understand how to reduce
their comparisons to correct meanings. And if he has done so he will
find such comparisons and images the most distinct and the most
intelligible.
Sense-perception has a great deal to do in apprehension and no one can
determine the boundary where the sense activity ends and the
intellectual begins. I do not recall who has made note of the
interesting fact that not one of twenty students in an Egyptian museum
knew why the hands of the figures of Egyptian wall pictures gave the
impression of being incorrect--nobody had observed the fact that all the
figures had two right hands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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