16. Goethe as Thinker and Investigator

If we could follow the whole series of processes that occur with respect to some sense perception or other from the peripheral nerve endings of the sense organs all the way into the brain, we would in fact nowhere arrive at a point where the mechanical, chemical, and organic—in short, the temporal-spatial processes—end and that appears which we actually call sense perception; for example, the sensation of warmth, of light, of sound, etc. One cannot find a place where the causal motion supposedly goes over into its effect, the perception. But can we then speak at all of the two things as standing in a relationship of cause and effect?