... ... PAGE. BUFFIER. His anticipation of Reid. Defines Common Sense. REID. Common Sense is the judgment of sound minds generally. Principles of Contingent Truth. The Principles of Necessary ... ... ... STEWART. Theory of Axioms, Definitions, and Mathematical De- MANSEL. Different kinds of Necessity :--Mathematical necessity: Enumeration of primary Pleasures and Pains. Important distinc- THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS. Aquinas. Reid. Stewart. Brown. CONSCIOUSNESS.-As mental life on the whole. As the subjective life more especially. View that Consciousness, as a whole, is SENSATION. Expresses various contrasting phenomena PRESENTATION and REPRESENTATION PERSONAL IDENTITY. Identity in living beings involves unbroken 98 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. DEFINITION AND DIVISIONS OF MIND. 1. HUMAN Knowledge, Experience, or Consciousness, falls under two great departments; popularly, they are called Matter and Mind; philosophers, farther, employ the terms External World and Internal World, Not-Self or Non-Ego and Self or Ego; but the names Object and Subject are to be preferred. The experience or consciousness of a tree, a river, a constellation, illustrates what is meant by Object. The experience of a pleasure, a pain, a volition, a thought, comes under the head of Subject. There is nothing that we can know, or conceive of, but is included under one or other of these two great departments. They comprehend the entire universe as ascertainable by us. 2. The department of the Object, or Object-World, is exactly circumscribed by one property, Extension. The world of Subject-experience is devoid of this property. A tree or a river is said to possess extended magnitude. A pleasure has no length, breadth, or thickness; it is in no respect an extended thing. A thought or idea may refer to extended magnitudes, but it cannot be said to have extension in itself. Neither can we say that an act of the will, a desire, a belief, occupy dimensions in space. Hence all that comes within the sphere of the Subject is spoken of as the Unextended. 3. Thus, if Mind, as commonly happens, is put for the sum total of Subject-experiences, we may define it negatively by a single fact-the absence of Extension. But, as Object-experience is also in a sense mental, the only account of Mind strictly admissible in scientific Psychology consists in specifying three properties or functions-Feeling, Will or Volition, and Thought or Intellect-through which all our experience, as well Objective as Subjective, is built up. This positive enumeration is what must stand for a definition. FEELING includes all our pleasures and pains, and certain modes of excitement, or of consciousness simply, that are neutral or indifferent as regards pleasure and pain. The pleasures of warmth, food, music; the pains of fatigue, poverty, remorse; the excitement of hurry and surprise, the supporting of a light weight, the touch of a table, the sound of a dog barking in the distance-are Feelings. The two leading divisions of the feelings are commonly given as Sensations and Emotions. WILL OF VOLITION comprises all the actions of human beings in so far as impelled or guided by Feelings. Eating, walking, building, sowing, speaking-are actions performed with some end in view; and ends are comprised in the gaining of pleasure or the avoiding of pain. Actions not prompted by feelings are not voluntary. Such are the powers of nature-wind, gravity, electricity, &c.; so also the organic functions of breathing, circulation, and the movements of the intestines. THOUGHT, INTELLECT, Intelligence or Cognition includes the powers known as Perception, Memory, Conception, Abstraction, Reason, Judgment, and Imagination. It is analyzed, as will be seen, into three functions, called Discrimination or Consciousness of Difference, Similarity or Consciousness of Agreement, and Retentiveness or Memory. The mind can seldom operate exclusively in any one of these three modes. A Feeling is apt to be accompanied more or less by Will and by Thought. When we are pleased, our will is moved for continuance or increase of the pleasure (Will); we at the same time discriminate and identify the pleasure, and have it impressed on the memory (Thought). (Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. i. p. 188.) Thus the Definition is also a Division of the Mind; that is, a classification of its leading or fundamental attributes. We may advert to some of the previous modes of defining and CLASSIFICATIONS OF MIND. 3 dividing the Mind. Reid says, 'By the mind of a man, we understand that in him which thinks, remembers, reasons, wills:' a definition by means of a division at once defective and redundant; the defect lies in the absence of Feeling; the redundancy in the addition of 'remember' and 'reason' to the comprehensive word 'think.' Reid's formal classification in expounding the mind is into Intellectual Powers and Active Powers. The submerged department of Feeling will be found partly mixed up with the Intellectual Powers, wherein are included the Senses and the Emotions of Taste, and partly treated of among the Active Powers, which comprise the exposition of the benevolent and the malevolent affections. Dr. Thomas Brown, displeased with the mode of applying the term 'Active' in the above division, went into the other extreme, and brought forward a classification where Feeling seems entirely to overlie the region of Volition. He divides mental states into external affections and internal affections. By external affections he means the feelings we have by the Senses, in other words Sensation. The internal affections he subdivides into intellectual states of mind and emotions. His division, therefore, is tantamount to Sensation, Emotion, and Intellect. All the phenomena commonly recognized as of an active or volitional character he classes as a part of Emotion. Sir William Hamilton, in remarking on the arrangement followed in the writings of Professor Dugald Stewart, states his own view as follows: If we take the Mental to the exclusion of Material phoenomena, that is, the phoenomena manifested through the medium of Self-consciousness or Reflection, they naturally divide themselves into three categories or primary genera;-the phænomena of Knowledge or Cognition,-the phoenomena of Feeling or of Pleasure and Pain,-and the phoenomena of Conation or of Will and Desire.' Intelligence, Feeling, and Will are thus distinctively set forth. 4. It is not practicable to discuss the powers of the mind in the exact order of the three leading attributes. Feeling and Volition each involve certain primary elements, and also certain secondary or complex elements due to the operation of the Intellect upon the primary. For example, Sensation is a primary department of feeling, and always precedes the Intellect; while the Emotions, which are secondary and derived, follow the exposition of the Intellectual. powers. The Will is to a great extent the product of the Retentive function of Intelligence; it is also dependent throughout on the Feelings; hence it is placed last in the course of the exposition; only, at an early stage, some notice is taken of its primary constituents. The arrangement is as follows: First, Feeling and Volition in the germ, together with the full detail of Sensation, which contains a department of Feeling, and exemplifies one of the Intellectual functions-Discrimination. The convenient title is MOVEMENT, SENSE and INSTINCT. Secondly, The INTELLECT. Thirdly, The EMOTIONS, completing the department of Feeling. Fourthly, The WILL. 5. Although Subject and Object (Mind and Matter) are the most widely opposed facts of our experience, yet there is, in nature, a concomitance or connexion between Mind and a definite Material organism for every individual. The nature and extent of this connexion will appear as we proceed; and, afterwards, the phraseology of the proposition will be rendered more exact. Each mind is known, by direct or immediate knowledge, only to itself. Other minds. are known to us solely through the material organism. The physical organs related to the mental processes are:I. The Brain and Nerves; II. The Organs of Movement, or the Muscles; III. The Organs of Sense; IV. The Viscera, including the Alimentary Canal, the Lungs, the Heart, &c. The greatest intimacy of relationship is with the Brain and Nerves. It has always been a matter of difficulty to express the nature of this concomitance, and hence a certain mystery has attached to the union of mind and body. The difficulty is owing to the fact that we are apt to insist on some kind of local or space relationship between the Extended and the Unextended. When we think of connexion, it is almost always of connexion in space; as in supposing one thing placed in the interior of another. This last figure is often applied to the present case. Mind is said to be internal to, or within, the body. Descartes localized mind in the pineal gland; the schoolmen debated whether the mind is all in the whole body, or all in every part. Such expressions are unsuitable to the case. The connexion is one of dependence, but not properly of local union. |