Should two ideas directly contradict one another, “resistance occurs” and “concepts become forces when they resist one another.”[/bold]
According to Johann Herbart, a German philosopher, ideas form as information from the senses combines. The term he used for ideas—Vorsfellung—encompasses thoughts, mental images, and even emotional states. These make up the entire content of the mind, and Herbart saw them not as static but dynamic elements, able to move and interact with one another. ( ① ) Ideas, he said, can attract and combine with other ideas or feelings, or repulse them, rather like magnets. ( ② ) Similar ideas, such as a color and tone, attract each other and combine to form a more complex idea. ( ③ ) However, if two ideas are unalike, they may continue to exist without association. ( ④ ) This causes them to weaken over time, so that they eventually sink below the “threshold of consciousness.” ( ⑤ ) They repel one another with an energy that propels one of them beyond consciousness, into a place that Herbart referred to as “a state of tendency”; and we now know as “the unconscious.”
*repulse: 물리치다