III. The Sixth Sense

III. The Sixth Sense.III. Der sechste Sinn.

Materialism teaches that truth lies only in experience, that all experience is the product of our sensibility, that sensibility and reality are therefore identical concepts. Plausible as these statements sound, they are nevertheless false, and it is easy to show that sensibility and reality are very different things in extent as in quality. We men have five senses, so already five realities, and now the question is which sense reveals reality proper, the objective qualities of things. If one evades this question by asserting that all five sensibilities have equal rights, that reality is the sum of these five sensibilities, one does not get far with that either; for man is a product of development, and his five senses were only formed and heightened in the course of the biological process. So reality has constantly changed, could change still further by the rise of further senses, and so it is shown that reality depends wholly on our organization. That is why no deep thinker has ever been a materialist. Beginning with Protagoras, who says that man is the measure of all things, down to Schopenhauer, who calls the world our idea, they have all seen that no view of the world can be built on this shaky ground of sensibility.

Let us suppose there were no men with five senses, but five kinds of men, each with one of these senses; then the smelling men, for example, would declare scent to be the only reality, the others other qualities of things. Finally it would be agreed that things have five qualities, of which one has been revealed to each kind of men. But if we imagine this assembly widened cosmically by representatives of all the inhabited stars there are, it would soon turn out that one and the same reality is mirrored differently for every living being, so that all, in meaning to speak of reality, speak only of their organization. I should not advise a Professor Büchner, as the envoy of our tiny little planet, to tell such an assembly that the only true view of the world is materialism, and that the reality perceived by the five senses of the inhabitants of the earth is the only reality. He would be completely outvoted, indeed simply laughed at.