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A Text-Book in Psychology: The Study of Psychology: Outlines of Psychology
A TextBook in Psychology The Study of Psychology Outlines of Psychology Author:Johann Friedrich Herbart, George Henry Lewes, Hermann Lotze Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE ACT OF RELATIVE KNOWLEDGE AND ATTENTION. § 22. Thus far we have spoken of the relations and interchange of ideas. There is in our interio... more »r life, however, besides this, a mental representation of these relations and of this interchange. The two are very different things. We know that if the idea of 'blue,' and at the same time that of red, originates within us, the two by no means mingle and produce 'violet.' Were this, however, to happen, then a third simple idea would merely have taken the place of the two others, and a comparison of these two would have been made impossible by their vanishing. Every comparison, and in general every relation between two elements (in this case, red and blue), presupposes that both points of relation remain separate, and that an ideating activity passes over from the one a to the other b, and at the same time becomes conscious of that alteration which it has experienced in this transition from the act of forming the idea of a to that of forming b. THE IDEA OF "LIKENESS. 4! Such an activity do we exercise in case we compare red and blue ; and thereupon there originates in us the new idea of a qualitative similarity which we ascribe to both. If at the same time a strong and a weak light are perceived, then the sensation therefrom is not that of a single light which might be the sum of both ; both rather remain separate; and again on passing from one to the other, we become conscious of another alteration in our state, — namely, that of the merely quantitative more or less of one and the same impression. Finally, if two quite similar impressions have been able to originate as distinct ideas within us, then they no longer fuse into a third; but when we compare them in the foregoing way and, on the transition from ...« less