Ernst Mach - Mental Quotes

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The power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

Ernst Mach

Nature consists of the elements given by the senses. Primitive man first takes out of them certain complexes of these elements that present themselves with a certain stability and are most important to him. The first and oldest words are names for "things". … The sensations are no "symbols of things". On the contrary the "thing" is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world.

Ernst Mach

Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes)

Ernst Mach

Physical science began in the witch's kitchen. It now embraces the organic and inorganic worlds, and with the physiology of articulation and the theory of the senses, has even pushed its researches, at times impertinently, into the province of mental phenomena.

Ernst Mach