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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
The guiding idea of Palágyi's Monism is what he has called the Principle of Polarity. This is made clear in Palágyi's own preface to the second edition of his main work, the Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen (N.V.). The lectures were originally given in 1908. The Second Edition and the Preface date from 1924. In this preface we learn that the quest for the creative on the one hand, and for unity through polarity on the other, were ever the two leading motives of his thought. Both are pervasive and permanent, and they support each other; but in so far as the intellectual urge towards unity prevails over the more artistic impulse to creative freedom, it is the principle of polarity that receives the main stress and exercises the greater influence. For Palágyi, as for Hegel, it is the main principle of mental evolution. “ Polarity,” so Palágyi tells us (N.V., p. vii), does not simply mean “ opposition,” the
page 159 note1 Biology demands for its complete study a double viewpoint. The vegetative life can be explained not only through the private indications of our animal processes, but also through the public indications of expressive mechanical movements.
page 164 note 1 The following passage is worth quoting in this connexion: “ Just as the pulsations of an artery follow at definite intervals and in a definite rhythm, so do the acts of our consciousness in general, and in particular those of our perceptual consciousness, possess on occasion a definite frequency and therefore a determinate rhythm which must be experimentally studied. Once this plan of research has been adopted, we will succeed in setting up a new branch of knowledge, the experimental theory of Consciousness or Reflection (Besinnung), one of whose first tasks will be to subject the intermittent character of human perceptual consciousness to a systematic examination: formulating the most specific as well as the most general laws of the pulse of perception, bringing under law the modifying influences of external conditions on the rise and fall of this pulsation, enquiring into the effect upon the pulse-beat arising from differences of sex and of age. Should a new physiological discipline of this type be possible, the Theory of Knowledge, which in the end should be just simply a Theory of human consciousness, would have as its main task to bring the intermittent character of our acts of perception into clear conceptual relief “ (W., p. 17).
page 170 note 1 In the Wahrnehmungslehre (chs. iv and v) the touch-sensations are discussed under the name of “ sensations of resistance “ (Widerstandsempfindungen). In the later Lectures on Natural Philosophy, pp. 137 sq., the name appears to have been dropped, and we read instead of Widerstandsgefühle, feelings of resistance.
page 172 note 1 For fuller developments of this point, see N.V., pp. 192–195, Logic, § 25, and above all the concluding chapter in the Wahrnehmungslehre on “ Raum und Zeit.”