Chapter VIII (part 3)

In addition to the simple sensations of these sense organs (color, sound, touch, smell and taste), in addition to the simple emotions of pleasure, pain, joy, anger, surprise, wonder, curiosity and many others, there is passing through our consciousness a series of complex sensations and higher (complex) emotions (moral, esthetic, religious). The content of emotional feelings, even the simplest—to say nothing of the complex—can never be wholly confined to concepts or ideas, and therefore can never be correctly or exactly expressed in words. Words can only allude to it, point to it. The interpretation of emotional feelings and emotional understanding is the problem of art . In combinations of words, in their meaning, their rhythm, their music—the combination of meaning, rhythm and music; in sounds, colors, lines, forms—men are creating a new world, and are attempting therein to express and transmit that which they feel, but which they are unable to express and transmit simply in words, i.e., in concepts. The emotional tones of life, i.e., of "feelings," are best transmitted by music, but it cannot express concepts, i.e., thought. Poetry endeavors to express both music and thought together. The combination of feeling and thought of high tension leads to a higher form of psychic life. Thus in art we have already the first experiments in a language of the future . Art anticipates a psychic evolution and divines its future forms. At the present time an average man, taken as a norm, has attained to three units of psychic life: sensation , perception , and conception . Furthermore, observation reveals the fact that some people at certain p. 84 times acquire a new, fourth unit of psychic life, which different authors and different schools name differently, but in which an element of knowledge or ideas is always united with an emotional element. If Kant's ideas are correct, if space with its characteristics is a property of our consciousness, and not of the external world, then the three-dimensionality of the world must in this or some other manner depend upon the constitution of our psychic apparatus. It is possible to put the question concretely in the following manner: What bearing upon the three-dimensional extension of the world has the fact that in our psychical apparatus we discover the categories above described—sensations, perceptions and concepts? We possess such a psychical apparatus and the world is three-dimensional . How is it possible to establish the fact that the three-dimensionality of the world depends upon such a constitution of our psychical apparatus? This could be proven or disproven undeniably only with the aid of experiments. If we could change our psychic apparatus and should then discover that the world around us was changing , this would constitute for us the proof of the dependence of the properties of space upon the properties of our consciousness. For example if we could make the above-mentioned higher form of psychic life (which appears now accidentally as it were and depends upon insufficiently studied conditions) just as definite, exact, and subject to our will as is the concept; and if the number of characteristics of space increased, i.e., if space became four-dimensional instead of being three-dimensional, this would affirm our presupposition, and would prove Kant's contention that space with its properties is a form of our sensuous receptivity . Or if we could diminish the number of units of our psychic life, and deprive ourselves or someone else of conceptions , leaving the psyche to act by perceptions and sensations only; and if by so doing the number of characteristics of the space surrounding us diminished; i.e., if for the person subjected to the test the world became two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional, and indeed p. 85 one-dimensional as a result of a still greater limitation of the psychic apparatus, by depriving the person of perceptions—this would affirm our presupposition, and Kant's idea could be considered proven.