Word Finder - sensation

definition

A physical feeling or perception from something that comes into contact with the body; something sensed.

definition

A widespread reaction of interest or excitement.

The sensation was almost physical.

I have had the same strange sensation even in the heart of the city.

She shuddered as the distant sensation of burning returned.

The sudden sensation of falling made him clutch the door frame.

The sensation left her feeling exposed.

She didn't exactly understand the sensation except that she didn't ever want that feeling to end.

A burning sensation began in her throat and she realized she was going to heave.

Another sensation rose up within her fast and hard.

A strange sensation made her glance down and she saw the drop of blood hit the porch.

Her scent and sensation of her warm skin against his was intoxicating.

His account of the notion of external existence, as derived, not from pure sensation, but from the experience of action on the one hand and resistance on the other, may be compared with the account of Bain and later psychologists.

In seeking ultimate reality in the circle of "active conscious sensation," he rules out all "metaphysic."

Jessi leaned into him, thrilled at the sensation of his arms enveloping her in his heat.

Hegel's is an intellectualist monism, explaining matter, sensation, personal individuality and will as forms of thought.

The variable first maxillae are seldom pediform, their function being concerned chiefly with nutrition, sensation and respiration.

He supposes that aesthesis and tropesis, as rudimentary sensation and will, are the very causes of condensation; that they belong to pyknatoms, to ponderables and imponderables, to chemical atoms and molecules.

The skin may itch, become red and experience a burning sensation.

It appears to his imagination that the affinity of two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen, the attraction of the spermatozoon to the ovum, and the elective affinity of d pair of lovers are all alike due to sensation and will.

When he applies sensation and will to nature, and through plants to the lowest animals, he considers their sensation and will to be rudimentary and unconscious.

In his Belfast address (1874), while admitting that matter as understood by Democritus is insufficient, because atoms without sensation cannot be imagined to produce sensation, he contended, nevertheless, that matter properly understood is " the promise and potency of all terrestrial life."

In thus endowing all matter with sensation like Haeckel he was not avoiding materialism.

Proceeding on this suggestion, and misled by the mathematical expression which he had given to Weber's law, Fechner held that a conscious sensation, like its stimulus, consists of units, or elements, by summation and increments of which conscious sensations and their differences are produced; so that consciousness, according to this unnecessary assumption, emerges from an integration of unconscious shocks or tremors.

But he had also to endure countless objections to his mathematical statement of Weber's law, to his unnecessary assumption of units of sensation, and to his unjustifiable transfer of the law from physical to physiological stimuli of sensations, involving in his opinion his parallelistic view of body and mind.

Now, Kant and his followers start from this second and narrower meaning, and usually narrow it still more by assuming that what appears to the senses is as mental as the sensation, being undistinguishable from it or from the idea of it, and that an appearance is a mental idea(Vorstellung) of sense; and then they conclude that we can know by inference nothing but such mental appearances, actual and possible, and therefore nothing beyond sensory experience.

But his point is that the very sensation of phenomena or appearances implies the things which appear.

It is curious that Avenarius should have brought forward this artificial hypothesis as the natural view of the world, without reflecting that on the one hand the majority of mankind believes that the environment (R) exists, has existed, and will exist, without being a counterpart of any living being as central part (C); and that on the other hand it is so far from being natural to man to believe that sensation and thought (E) are different from, and merely dependent on, his body (C), that throughout the Homeric poems, though soul is required for other purposes, all thinking as well as sensation is regarded as a purely bodily operation.

He does not mean that will is the only mental operation; for he recognizes idea derived from sensation, and feeling, as well as will.

But natural realism, as finally interpreted by Hamilton, was too dogmatic, too unsystematic, and too confused with elements derived from Kantian idealism to withstand the brilliant criticism of Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), a work which for a time almost persuaded us that Nature as we know it from sensations is nothing but permanent possibilities of sensation, and oneself only a series of states of consciousness.

It will be remembered that Fechner regarded every composite body as the appearance of a spirit; so that when, for example, molecular motion of air is said to cause a sensation of sound in me, it is really a spirit appearing as air which causes the sensation in my spirit.

Other symptoms are itching, tinnitus (noise or ringing in the ears), a sensation of fullness in the ear, and otalgia, or pain in the ear.

The primary symptoms of labyrinthitis are vertigo and hearing loss, along with a sensation of ringing in the ears called tinnitus.

The theoretical side of inner nature in its successive grades from sensation to the highest form of spirit, the abstracting reason which emphasizes the difference of subjective and objective, leaves an unsolved problem which receives satisfaction only in the practical, the individualizing activity.

In 1858 she revisited Russia, where she created a sensation as a spiritualistic medium.

This intellectual discovery requires sensation and retention of sensation; so that sense (ea-Ono-Ls) receives impressions, imagination (0avravLa) retains them as images, intellect (Van) generalizes the universal, and, when it is intelligence of essence, is always true.

Sensation is not the reception of the selfsame essence of an external body, but one's perception of one's sentient organism as affected, and especially of its organs resisting one another, e.g.

Berkeley is compelled to see that an immediate perception is not a thing, and that what we consider permanent or substantial is not a sensation but a group of qualities, which in ultimate analysis means sensations either immediately felt or such as our experience has taught us would be felt in conjunction with these.

It produced a great and immediate sensation.

Haeckel answers that it has no origin, because sensation is an inherent property of all substance.

Nevertheless he was too much a child of his age to keep things known steadily before him; having asked the metaphysical question he proceeded to find a psychological answer in a theory of sensation, which asserted the mere hypothesis that the being which we ascribe to things on the evidence of sensation consists in their being felt.

He generalized Weber's law in the form that sensation generally increases in intensity as the stimulus increases by a constant function of the previous stimulus; or increases in an arithmetical progression as the stimulus increases in a geometrical ratio; or increases by addition of the same amount as the stimulus increases by the same multiple; or increases as the logarithm of the stimulus.

Having long assumed that the whole world is animated throughout, and that there are always two parallel series, physical and psychical, he concluded that, while a physical stimulus is causing a physical nervous process, a psychical accompaniment of the stimulus is causing the sensation, which, according to him, is the psychical accompaniment of the nervous process; and that, as the whole physical and the whole psychical series are the same, differing only as outer and inner, this identity holds both of stimulus and its psychical accompaniment and of nervous process and its accompanying sensation.

Further, Wundt declares that the psychical compound of sensations, with which, according to him, we actually start, is not a complex sensation, but a compound idea; so that I am expected to believe that, when I hear the chord of D, I am not conscious of single sensations of D, F, A, and have only a compound idea of the chord - as if the hearing of music were merely a series of ideas!

It follows that every psychical compound into which temporal and spatial ideas enter must itself be an idea; and, as time at any rate accompanies all our sensations, it follows that every psychical compound of sensations, containing as it does, always temporal, if not also spatial, ideas, must be a compound idea, and not, as nativists suppose, Schuppe for instance, a compound sensation.

It is, according to him, something more than sensation, but less than perception; it is common to us with lower animals such as dogs; its operation consists in co-ordinating sensations into an aggregate which the subject throws back into space, and thereby has a consciousness of a total object outside itself, e.g.

He ingeniously suggested that the external agent is one feeling regarded objectively, and the internal effect another feeling regarded subjectively; " and therefore," to quote his own words, " to say that it is a molecular movement which produces a sensation of sound, is equivalent to saying that a sensation of sight produces a sensation of hearing."

He does not say what happens when we use vision alone and still infer that an external stimulus causes the internal sensation.

From Reid he adopted the belief in an external world beyond sensation, from Biran the explanation of personality by will, from Schelling the identification of all reason in what he called " impersonal reason," which he supposed to be identical in God and man, to be subjective and objective, psychological and ontological.

We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes.

Fouillee (q.v.) rightly objects that we must not thus impute thought and intention to Nature, and yet does not scruple to impute to it life, sensation and want.

He vacillated a great deal about our mode of perceiving the external world; but his final view (edition of Reid's works, note D*) consisted in supposing that (1) sensation is an apprehension of secondary qualities purely as affections of the organism viewed as ego; (2) perception in general is an apprehension of primary qualities as relations of sensations in the organism viewed as non-ego; while (3) a special perception of a so-called " secundo-primary " quality consists in " the consciousness of a resisting something external to our organism."