 He sees himself as agreeing with Helmholtz when Helmholtz “resolves the activity of the senses into a kind of inference” (Lange 1873–75, 3:228). It does not follow, he emphasizes, that “the search for a physical mechanism of sensation, as of thought, [is] superfluous or inadmissible. At length, however, we see that such a mechanism, like every other represented mechanism, must be itself only a necessarily occurring picture of an unknown state of things” (Lange 1873–75, 3:229). He concludes: