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by walter_bishop
3482 days ago
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"Ernst Mach had a mystical experience", It's interesting to put that quote in context: "I have always felt it as a stroke of good fortune that early in life, at about the age of fifteen, I lighted, in my fathers library, on a copy of Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. The book made at the time a powerful and inextinguishable impression on me, the like of which I never afterwards experienced in any of my philosophical reading. Some two or three years later the superfluity of the thing in itself abruptly dawned upon me. On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet the moment was decisive for my whole view. I still had to straggle long and hard before I was able to retain the new conception in my special subject. With the valuable parts of physical theories we necessarily assume a good dose of false metaphysics, which it is very difficult to sift out from what should be preserved, especially when those theories have become very familiar to us. At times, too, the traditional, instinctive views would arise with great power and place impediments in my way. Only by alternate studies in physics and the physiology of the senses, and by historico-physical investigations (since about 1863) and after having endeavoured in vain to settle the conflict by a physico-psychological monadology (in my lectures on psychophysics...) have I attained to any considerable stability in my views." from 'the Analysis of Sensations' |
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