Ernst Mach - The Analysis of Sensations

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Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

Ernst Mach
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

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
The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

Ernst Mach
Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

Ernst Mach
The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realised, and any other must be meaningless.

Ernst Mach
No point of view has absolute, permanent validity. Each has importance only for some given end.

Ernst Mach
My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

Ernst Mach
If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.

Ernst Mach
Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

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

Ernst Mach
A movement that we will to execute is never more than a represented movement, and appears in a different domain from that of the executed movement, which always takes place when the image is vivid enough.

Ernst Mach
Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

Ernst Mach
Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

Ernst Mach