Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/247

 Ineffable content remains beyond forever. We must not make the mistake (which is really the source of all difficulties here) to think that art would be more wonderful or more perfect if it could express content, and that its inexpressibility must always remain a matter of regret. No such thing! These misunderstandings must be radically overcome. It is perfectly true that Poetry — one of the great realities in life - is a matter of content, but content is important because of its formal properties. What is joy? If I want to describe it (not only to some one else, but also to myself) I must say: it is that emotion which makes me smile, makes me dance, makes me be kind to my fellow creatures, makes you forget sorrows — and so forth; I may mention a hundred other things, they will be all formal properties, nothing else can be said, nothing else is expressed in poetry.

Can anyone still think that when the poet speaks of a green meadow, the word "green" stands for the content while when the scientist speaks of a green leaf the same word will stand for the structure of green? I think we must be convinced by this time that the word, wherever it occurs in a sentence can never express content, no matter who utters the sentence and for what purpose. The sound of the word "green" may of course produce a certain content in the listener, which is not done by the words "light of wave-length so-and-so" although the meaning is the same.

What is true for art is a fortiori true for aesthetics; which tries to speak about art, and it is hardly necessary to add that propositions in Ethics certainly will not have a power which they have nowhere else. As regards psychology, it may be noted that its method, whether "introspective" or "experimental", is in its last principles not different from the method of physical science: its propositions express psychological facts by repeating their structure. Old-fashioned psychologists used to think that we can "know" more about our own minds than about other people's, because only our own mind can be investigated by introspection. But this view rests again on a confusion of intuition and knowledge in the legitimate sense of the word. What we really know by introspection, can be expressed in our propositions and if this is the case we can learn just as much from the propositions in which other persons describe their own mental life, and from other manifestations in which that life expresses itself. As all bodily manifestations, including speech, form part of a person's behaviour, we may maintain that