66 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
the brain when I sense redness. Redness emerges again
only as an effect in the soul, and is caused by the brain
process alone. Therefore, Hartmann says: “What the sub-
ject perceives are therefore always only modifications of
its own psychic states and nothing else.”^9 When I have
the sensations, however, these are still far from being
grouped into what I perceive as things. After all, only in-
dividual sensations can be transmitted to me through the
brain. Sensations of hardness and softness are transmitted
to me through the sense of touch; color and light through
the sense of sight. Yet these are united in one and the
same object. Such union, then, can only be effected by the
soul itself. That is, the soul assembles separate sensa-
tions, transmitted by the brain, into bodies. My brain con-
veys to me separately, and by altogether different
pathways, sensations of sight, taste, and hearing that the
soul then combines into the mental picture of a trumpet.
This final stage of a process (the mental picture of the
trumpet) is given to my consciousness as the very first. In
it, nothing may be found of what is outside me and origi-
nally made the impression on my senses. On the way to
the brain and, through the brain, to the soul, the external
object has been completely lost.
It would be hard to find another edifice of thought in
the history of human culture that has been constructed
with more ingenuity and that nevertheless, on closer scru-
tiny, collapses into nothing. Let us look more closely at
how this edifice has been built up. It begins with what is
9.Fundamental Problems of Epistemology.
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