Human, All Too Human, Part 18 summary
Part 18 of 152 · 3 min to read the part
In 18, the speaker traces beliefs in unchanging substances, identical things, and free will to the development of organic sensation and judgment, rather than treating them as timeless truths. The argument recasts metaphysics as a discipline that mistakes deeply rooted errors about things and actions for basic truths.
What happens
- The speaker challenges a logician’s claim that perceiving objects as independent, unchanging substances is a primordial law.
- He proposes that organisms gradually distinguish things through their relationships to pleasure and pain.
- Judgment begins with feelings and belief, while intervals without feeling make the world appear unchanged.
- Humans inherit belief in identical things from lower organisms, although advanced scientific experience contradicts it.
- Feelings seem isolated and uncaused, encouraging the mistaken belief that actions arise from free will.
- The speaker concludes that metaphysics treats ancient organic errors about substance and freedom as truths.
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What does the speaker say contradicts belief in identical things?
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