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III Male and Female Consciousness Before we can deal in more detail with one of the main differences between the male and female psyche and the extent to which it transforms the objects of the world into its own contents, it will be necessary to take some psychological soundings and de¤ne some concepts. As the views and principles of the prevailing psychology have developed without regard to this particular topic it would be surprising if the theories of that psychology could readily be applied to it. Furthermore, as yet there is no psychology but only psychologies, and a decision to join any one school and treat the entire topic on the basis of that school’s dogmas would seem much more arbitrary than the procedure adopted here, which attempts to re-examine the phenomena as independently as necessary, albeit with the closest possible reference to existing achievements. Attempts to regard all psychic life in a uni¤ed manner, and to trace it back to a single fundamental process, have expressed themselves in empirical psychology mainly in the relationship assumed by different researchers between sensations and feelings. Herbart derived feelings from ideas, while Horwicz claimed that feelings developed from sensations. The leading modern psychologists have emphasized the hopelessness of these monistic efforts. Nevertheless, there was some truth in them. To ¤nd that truth, one must make a distinction that is, strangely enough, missing in today’s psychology, even though it seems obvious. One must separate the ¤rst awareness of a sensation, the ¤rst thought of a thought, the ¤rst feeling of a feeling, from later repetitions of the same process, where there is the possibility of recognition. This distinction seems to be of great signi¤cance in respect to a number of problems, but unfortunately it is not made in today’s psychology . Every plain, clear, vivid sensation, as well as every sharply de¤ned and distinct thought, before it is put into words for the ¤rst time, is preceded by a stage of indistinctness, although this may often be extremely brief. Likewise, every unfamiliar association is preceded by a more or less short period of time in which there is only a vague sense of direction toward what is to be associated, a general presentiment of an association, a sense of something belonging with something else. Leibniz in particular must have had in mind related processes which, having been more or less well described, gave rise to the above theories of Herbart and Horwicz. Since only pleasure and unpleasure, and possibly, as Wundt suggested, relaxation and tension, repose and stimulation, are generally considered the simple basic forms of feelings, the division of psychic phenomena into sensations and feelings is too narrow for those phenomena which are part of the stages preceding clarity, and consequently useless for the purpose of describing them, as will shortly become more evident. In the interests of a precise de¤nition I will therefore use what is probably the most general classi¤cation of psychic phenomena that could be made: Avenarius’s division into “elements” and “characters ” (where “character” has nothing in common with the object of characterology ). Avenarius has made it dif¤cult to use his theories, not so much by his entirely new terminology (which contains many excellent elements and is practically indispensable for certain things that he was the ¤rst to notice and name), but rather by his unfortunate obsession with deriving psychology from a system of a physiology of the brain which he himself only gained from the psychological facts of inner experience (with the external addition of the most general biological knowledge of the balance between nutrition and work), and which is the greatest obstacle to the acceptance of many of his discoveries. In his Kritik der reinen Erfahrung [Critique of pure experience] the foundations on which the hypotheses of the physiological ¤rst part evolved in his own mind were provided by the psychological second part, but his account reverses these steps and therefore the ¤rst part strikes the reader like a report on a journey to Atlantis. Because of these dif¤culties I must take this opportunity to explain brie®y the meaning of Avenarius’s classi¤cation, which has proved most suitable for my purpose. An “element,” for Avenarius, is what in standard psychology is simply called “sensation,” “content of a sensation,” or simply “content” (in connection with both “perception” and “reproduction”), and what is described by Schopenhauer as “idea,” by the English as both “impression” and “idea...

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