Higher cognition
3.7.1 Thinking things
We do not perceive “the spatial” or “the temporal” as such, but only ever things in space, or events in time (SW VI: 112).[56] Herbart again explains this fact in terms of the “complete and sufficient explanatory ground” of the psyche’s unity (SW VI: 116). The soul’s unity necessitates that our representations of things, and the events taking place among them, originally constitute themselves out of the simple sensations of the particular senses. Therefore, all our representations would present (darstellen) only a single object that would be neither spatial nor temporal, without parts, and immune to differentiation—except for the inhibitions and oppositions that underlie the simple sensations of the particular senses in their mutual encounters in the psyche (SW VI: 115, e.g.; cf. Stout 1888b: 478). This is what conditions the multiplicity of things and events: they are nothing other than the determinate groupings of sensations in our consciousness (Weiss 1928: 93).