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 CHAPTER III

DEFINITION OF THE IMAGE

on with our inventory, after sensations come images, ideas, and concepts; in fact, quite a collection of phenomena, which are generally considered as essentially psychological.

So long as one does not carefully analyse the value of ideas, one remains under the impression that ideas form a world apart, which is sharply distinguished from the physical world, and behaves towards it as an antithesis. For is not conception the contrary of perception? and is not the ideal in opposition to reality?

Thoughts have some characteristics of fancy, of freedom, even of unreality, which are wanting to the prosaicness of heavy material things. Thoughts sport with the relations of time and space; they fly in a moment across the gulf between the most distant objects; they travel back up the course of time; they bring near to us events centuries away; they conceive objects which are unreal; they imagine combinations which upset all physical laws, and, further, these conceptions remain