Ernst Mach - Sensations Quotes

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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
Properly speaking the world is not composed of "things" as its elements, but colors, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.

Ernst Mach
Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

Ernst Mach
Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

Ernst Mach
Just as without sensations of heat there would have been no theory of heat, so also without sensations of space there would be no geometry.

Ernst Mach