Apollo at the gardens of Versailles• In our minds, we arbitrarily divide the world into fragments and then feel we have discovered something when we find they can be connected.
• Helmholtz (1878) argued all physical qualities — colour, texture, smell, shape, etc. — belong not to objects in the world but to our perceptual faculties. It is we who mistakenly assign such qualities to the objects ‘in themselves’. This applies even to the quality of ‘objecthood’.
• In one sense, objects do not have any existence independent of perception. In another sense, objects (insofar as the word has any sense) clearly do exist, since we encounter them on a daily basis.
