"The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses"
About this Quote
The intent is philosophical, but it’s also a disciplinary provocation. In late 19th-century physics, the old metaphysical furniture - absolute space, absolute time, invisible causes taken as givens - still sat comfortably in the room. Mach’s empiricism insists that science should be built from what can be experienced and operationalized, not from inherited intuitions about reality’s backstage. The subtext: if your access to the world is always through sensory and conceptual apparatus, then treating your model as the world is a category error disguised as realism.
What makes the line work is its sly inversion. He grants the reader a modest insight ("the look of things is influenced") and then shows how that modesty is performative: we accept our senses are fallible, but we refuse to follow the implication to its unsettling endpoint. Mach isn’t saying the world is a hallucination; he’s saying our certainty about what the world is, independent of how we make it intelligible, is the real superstition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite | Cite this Quote |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mach, Ernst. (n.d.). The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-plain-man-is-familiar-with-blindness-and-148036/
Chicago Style
Mach, Ernst. "The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-plain-man-is-familiar-with-blindness-and-148036/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-plain-man-is-familiar-with-blindness-and-148036/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.
