94 THEORETICAL BIOLOGY 



J called the form-giving melody a " schema," and the art of 

 shaping, which lies hidden in our mind, he called " schematisa- 

 tion." 



Following Plato here, Kant compares the schema of 

 empirical things with a kind of monogram, which has stamped 

 itself on our mind, and forms the starting-point both for 

 shaping things and for drawing images in the imagination. 



In order to convince ourselves of the correctness of this 

 theory, we must turn our attention to those instances in 

 which the schema separates itself from the sense-signs, for 

 here its efficacy becomes most obvious. I remember once 

 when I was at Naples how, along with two other biologists, 

 I looked for a microscope in vain, because one of us had said 

 that he had set it upright on the table. It was only when 

 the attendant, who in the meanwhile had tilted it, pointed 

 the microscope out to us, that we suddenly saw it there before 

 our eyes. The sense-signs belonging to the microscope were 

 not hidden from us, but were concerned with other instruments 

 that were standmg on the table. The melody of the direc- 

 tion-signs that should have formed the microscope could not 

 sound, because we were trying to proceed with the business 

 of shaping on the lines of the vertical microscope. Without 

 the subjective conditioning of the schema, no thing can exist 

 in the world. 



Those cases are commoner in which a wrong melody 

 sounds, with the result that we form a wrong object. To 

 this category belong the many mistakes we are so liable to 

 make in a half-light. We usually find afterwards that the 

 contour of the wrongly formed object corresponds in some 

 essential points with the right one, and our mistake consisted 

 in our completing wrongly the first bars, which were the same 

 in both melodies. In the twilight, we are very often uncertain 

 as to what melody ought to sound. 



In broad daylight, similar mistakes occur with moving 



