John Wesley Powell

“ There is no one who can form a judgment who does not take it for granted that the concomitants, however unlike they may be, can not exist apart. Symbolism is not mere poetry that obscures reason, but it is a logical method of timesaving thought. Judgment itself is by symbolism, in which the manifestation of one property is interpreted as a symbol of all the properties known about the object. ”

“ In a twinkling of an eye my mind travels a thousand miles, and I am climbing the gray sandstone cliff which rises in the midst of the valley of Illinois river and is known as “Starved Rock.” The miles my soul has traveled are only equaled by the time over which it has returned. ”

“ On careful examination it will always be found that judgments of causation are verified by the congruence of concepts.
The stream of thought is composed of a series of widely diverse elements, or mentations, that are judgments, all differing among themselves. Now, it is impossible for the mind to dwell on any one of these elements. You cannot think of a scratch long; the mind immediately passes to something else—another sight or sound. Consciousness, which is awareness of a change in self, is the absolute, the independent of thought and that on which inferences are founded ”

“ Thus we have ideas of sensation or classification, ideas of perception or integration, ideas of understanding or coöperation, and ideas of reflection or history, all derived from the germs of sense impression as they have been made on the mind of the individual in moments, hours, days, and years.
A boulder cannot move from the bank into the swift channel in order that it may journey down the stream, but a man may travel from the distant hill to voyage on the river. ”

“ A stream of judgments flow through the mind. As the ego has self-activity it changes its position in the environment at will and a different environment plays on the senses at every change in the position of the ego. ”

“ Every action is self-action and every passion is self-passion, but the action of one must have its correlate in the action of another, and the passion of one must have its correlate in the passion, of another. ”

“ Particularly intensive associations by which striking events are recalled, because of the deep effects made on the mind, have been observed by thoughtful men for more than twenty centuries. In moods of contemplation a judgment recalls some remote judgment which was startling at the time, and as we go on from moment to moment, recalling a multitude of things by a multitude of associations, this special instance is thrust on the mind and we stop to consider it. ”

“ Thus the metaphysicians have always failed to discover the nature of a judgment with its pentalogic elements, in which both consciousness and choice appear with comparison, which completes the judgment. They also fail to discover that a presentative judgment is only initiated by a sense impression, and that the ego must still recall past impressions in a concept to make the judgment complete, and they also fail to discover that the representative judgment is initiated by recalling a past concept and comparing it with another concept of past judgments. ”

“ That which I have sometimes called symbolism and that which I have sometimes called association are the same thing. When a sensation which is the result of a sense impression caused by one attribute of a body, is taken as a symbol of the body itself with all its attributes, it becomes a symbol of all with which it is associated. ”

“ We must now shoulder the task of explaining the laws of symbolism or association, which have been assumed from time to time and partially explained in this discussion.
It has been shown how concepts are formed as groups of judgments in sensation, perception, apprehension, and reflection, and how ideas develop simultaneously. We are now to show how they are compounded with one another, and how in this process incongruous ideas are adjusted by the elimination of judgments that are fallacies, for judgments must ultimately die if they do not fit in their proper places. ”

“ Hence we see that the judgments which we make are exceedingly multitudinous and heterogeneous. But all of these judgments are assembled in concepts by more temporary or more permanent purposes. What judgments can be made are determined by the environment; but what judgments the mind selects to make are determined by the purpose. Thus the ego is the creature of environment and self-activity. The stream of judgments is thought, and thought is controlled by self-activity and environment. ”

“ Every cognition involves a judgment and its verification, and the verification is founded on the congruence of judgments, one with another of a higher grade.
In the lower stages of the development of mind, verification is sometimes by repetition, oftener by submitting the judgment to verification by another sense; but in the higher stages of the development of mind, verification is by experimentation. We go on from generation to generation with unverified judgments and suppose that our concepts are composed of cognitions, when in fact they are composed of fallacious judgments. ”

“ By reflecting on the past and comparing it with the present, we prophesy of the future and often our prophecies are confirmed. By day we prophesy of the night, and the night comes; at night we prophesy of the morning, and the morning comes. ”

“ When the steps in the course of logical reasoning have been taken many times, the mind finds it unnecessary to tread the ground again and again, with slow and measured pace, but it springs from point to point, and the greater reasoners make the greater leaps. This is a fact well known to scientific men, but it gives to the procession of mentations those characteristics which cause the greatest wonder to men, and which have led to many of the errors of psychology. ”

“ The child is born, it grows to be a lad, a youth, a young man, a vigorous adult, an old man, and the judgments formed are compounded into ideas of becoming. It is thus by reflection that a vast multitude of judgments are compounded into ideas of the changes wrought by time, and reflection becomes the special process of cognizing metagenesis. As on the wings of perception all lands are viewed, so on wings of reflection all times are conned. ”

“ The methods of comparing judgments and concepts are innumerable, and every judgment is an act of comparison, and we are forever judging for the purposes of discovering congruities; an incongruous judgment acts upon a healthy mind as a moral irritant. If this and this judgment do not agree, it is an evidence of ignorance and a suggestion of imbecility. There is no other motive that clings to man so long as the desire for wisdom. ”

“ As we judge by comparing- concepts with other concepts or with impressions, one judgment by a faculty is associated with other judgments by the same faculty, and as one property is concomitant with all the others, one property becomes a symbol of all the others, so that there is association by comparison of concepts and association by symbolism. ”

“ The one motion of the body is the reciprocal of the many motions of the particles, hence the one force of the body is the reciprocal of the many motions of the particles, for the force of the body is the reciprocal of the motion of the particles. The one time of the body is the reciprocal of the many times of a particle, hence the one causation of the body is the reciprocal of the many times of the particles. The one judgment of the body is the reciprocal of the many judgments of the particles, hence the one concept of the body is the reciprocal of the many judgments of the particles. ”

“ As the days, weeks, months, and years go by we learn by experience of the changes wrought in self and infer changes yet to be wrought. By experience we discover the changes wrought in others, and by inference judgments are formed of changes yet to be wrought. It is by experience that we learn of all the changes in environment. ”

“ These are consciousness and choice. Here consciousness is awareness of an effect, the cause of which is an act of the external world thrust upon self at the present time, or upon self at sundry past times. The inference, or interpretation, is a choice of, or guess at, the cause. ”

“ Until the terms of grammar are made to conform with the terms of psychology, there must always be some confusion. Formal logic is the logic of grammar, and the purpose for which it was devised was success in disputation. Scientific logic is the logic of kinds, and it is of scientific logic that we speak in this essay. The logic of which we speak is the logic of reasoning, not the logic of grammar. ”

“ The subject matter is the beginning of an epistemology or theory of cognition, which will require another volume for its completion, when a volume of psychology will follow.
It has been set forth that consciousness is self-consciousness. When the self is conscious of an effect on self it infers a cause, and when it is conscious of being a cause it infers an effect. ”

“ But the nexus of association is not always adventitious. It is often controlled by an established design. With the fool, adventitious relation is the principal nexus of thought in the procession; with the sage, logical relation is the chief nexus.
The links of relation in the chain of thought are not always apparent to the thinker himself. Steps in the procession of reasoning are often canceled; the mind passes, by great bounds, from one to another. ”

“ Now, men practically and overtly consider their concepts and a language is a vast reservoir of conventional symbols used for this purpose. There is no human language so crude that it does not have tens of thousands of such symbols, which, put together in propositions or sentences, have the power of expressing all the judgments which the people who use the language are able to make. We now see the enormous development of ideation which man has accomplished by the invention of language. ”

“ Judgments of reflection seem to be especially subject to error and as such to be compounded into false concepts and to be long entertained as such. In the act of making the judgment there must be judgments of bodies impinging on one another, leading to judgments of apprehension. ”

“ Others have considered presentative judgments as instinctive or intuitive, for such judgments are often made instantaneously and without apparent consciousness of previous judgments. The nature of intuition we have already set forth. Kant also believes that representative judgments are controlled by forms of thought preëxisting in the mind and not derived from experience, in which all judgments are molded. He supposes the mind to be endowed with the knowledge of space as empty space and of time as empty time, and that the ego fills the empty space and empty time with forms of thought. ”

“ Third, there is a guess or a choice of some external object as its cause, which revives the consciousness of the concept of the object chosen. Fourth, this second consciousness is compared with the first. Fifth, a judgment is made of likeness or unlikeness between the terms compared. The first cause, when it is sense impression, is an act of something in the environment, but when it is a reproduction it is a self-activity. The second cause is always a self-activity. ”

“ For example, I see a man strike another and cause pain in that other. I must make two judgments of perception to see the men, a judgment of understanding to see the force, a judgment of reflection to see the effect, and perhaps another judgment of perception to realize the pain. While this maneuver is passing in the field many other events are occurring under the eye, the ear, and other senses, and the many judgments combine in the verification of the judgment formed of the maneuver. ”

“ Morphology considers not only forms, but it also considers kinds, forces, causes, and concepts. Dynamics considers not only forces, but it also considers kind, forms, causes, and concepts. Evolution considers not only causes, but it considers kinds, forms, forces, and concepts; and ideation considers not only concepts, but it also considers kinds, forms, forces, and causes, and the difference between these five concomitants is the point of view when every one of the essentials and its derivatives is considered abstractly. ”

“ The habits of thought engendered by the study of abstract mathematics often leads the mathematician into the very same pitfalls into which the metaphysician stumbles.
The manifestations of properties are symbols, because one becomes the representative of all the others in the body manifested. ”

“ For ages man believed the heavenly bodies to be molar, that is, to be movable by man at his will, moving from east to west along the face of a solid domed sky, and they supposed them to return from west to east under the ground, and it required ages to invent another hypothesis—that of a system of spheres revolving in orbits concentric to the sun. ”

“ It is not uncommon in savagery to attribute winds to trees. A common error of this kind is discovered in the minds of most persons, for it is widely believed that forests are the cause of rains. An interesting book has been written, widely read, and popularly approved, which is based on the assumption that the aridity of desert lands is due to the absence of forests. ”