Cogitation

“ Sense, in fact, still remained the criterion of truth; all that can be affirmed is, that there was a tendency to rise to a different standard, the standard of thought and reason, in the settlement of philosophical questions—the tendency to find something which should be true for all intellect, and not merely for our intellect; and this tendency showed itself unmistakably in the reduction of all sensible phenomena to one sensible principle—to wit, water, or moisture. ”

“ We have everywhere called to mind, maintained, and confirmed by the errors of those who have dared to break it, this rule of true psychological analysis, that, before passing to the question of the origin of an idea, a notion, a belief, any principle whatever, the actual characters of this idea, this notion, this belief, this principle, must have been a long time studied and well established, with the firm resolution of not altering them under any pretext whatever in wishing to explain them. ”

“ By these means I was led to see that a great part of what we call knowledge does not come to us, as we falsely suppose it does, through mere logic or Reason, nor through unaided experience, but through the emotions and the Imagination, tested by Reason and experience. ”

“ But when, on the contrary, one accepts a logical and luminous system of thought, a revelation which offers an explanation of the mystery of being entirely consistent with reason, you think that very remarkable! ”

“ The number of these ideas is the measure of our knowledge; exactness of thought depends on their clearness and precision; the art of comparing them one with another is called human reason. Thus what I call the reasoning of the senses, or the reasoning of the child, consists in the formation of simple ideas through the associated experience of several sensations; what I call the reasoning of the intellect, consists in the formation, of complex ideas through the association of several simple ideas. ”

“ As a result we shall soon find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals. ”

“ Again, in the multiplied reflex action of the mind upon itself and its own judgments and conceptions, there may be some imperfections in the analysis or critical examination of the component parts of the idea, in the synthesis or construction of these component parts into an ideal formula, and in the language by which verbal expression is given to the conceptions of the mind. What is to be aimed at is, to obtain intellectual conceptions which are clear and adequate to the idea, and a verbal expression which is also clear and adequate to the mental conception. ”

“ We may conclude with logic as sound and certain as is used in any scientific deduction, that every sense, faculty, and hope of the human soul has an objective reality in relation to which it is developed as surely as the wing argues an atmosphere, or the eye an ether. ”

“ Thus as perceptions, which are first, are the conclusions of reason, so the facts of true revelation, being given, become the conclusions of all sound logic; for every truth of the Word can be confirmed by irrefutable reasoning. ”

“ All that remains for us, in that impossibility which nature has imposed on us of attaining a more intimate knowledge of the essence and constitution either of mind or of matter, is to attend to the phenomena which they present, analysing whatever is complex, and tracing the order of every sequence. ”

“ Whichever of the theories you may yourselves adopt it is essential to the prosecution of your philosophical studies that you should be made aware of the existence of the distinction between them. The one of these theories regards knowledge or ideas as the essence of the mind; the other of them regards the mind as something which may exist destitute of all knowledge or ideas. ”

“ By thus first distinguishing sharply between the conscious internal meaning of an idea and its apparently external meaning, we get before us an important way of stating the problem of knowledge or, in other words, the problem of the whole relation between Idea and Being. ”

“ Judgment, forethought, common-sense, inference, ingenuity, genius, reason, and abstract thought, are all exercises of the cognitive or perceptive power of mind, and consist, all of them, in nothing more nor less than the discerning of relations among stimuli. ”

“ Either we affirm the intuition of the concrete, real object, from which the abstract conception of the good, the beautiful, and the true is derived, or we can prove only the existence of these conceptions in the mind, and cannot argue from the conceptions to the reality, or in any way perceive clearly the existence of the reality in an order external to our own mind. ”

“ Mind, mode of thinking, mode of thinking and feeling, moral and intellectual constitution, that mystic transparency full of pulses and motions, this thinking apparatus,—whichever phrase or image we adopt, there are certain appertaining considerations which we have to take along with us.
(1.) There is the consideration of differences of degree, quality, and worth. Mind may be great or small, noble or mean, strong or weak; the mode of thinking of one person or one time may be higher, finer, grander than that of another ”

“ Under this conception, the oppositions of thought which play so important a part in philosophy,—Being and Thought, Mind and Nature, Soul and Body, Freedom and Law, Natural Inclination and Moral Effort, Mechanism and Teleology,—are reconciled. ”

“ When they themselves say that they perceive the things by an immediate act of a faculty given for that purpose by their Creator, it would be said of them by their opponents that they find an idea or conception in their own minds, and from the idea or conception, infer the existence of a corresponding objective reality. ”

“ The great thinkers of the first rank who have undertaken to sound the significance of rational knowledge, {xxxv} and who have appreciated the meaning of the synthetic unity of the knowing mind and the world of objects that submit to its forms of thought, have recognized that there must be some deep-lying fundamental relation between the mind that knows and the world that is known, some Reality common to both outer and inner realms. ”

“ In other words in sense-perception and conception we have already, as in self-conscious thought, the necessary distinction between the perceiving, conceiving and thinking Ego and the object of perception, conception, and thought. ”

“ The belief or unconscious conviction that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form—in other words, that every fact consists in some thing having some quality—has rendered most philosophers incapable of giving any account of the world of science and daily life. ”

“ The instances we have given are all of them propositions or judgments, or else conceptions formed out of propositions or judgments, the purpose of which is to interpret experience. The actual experience itself, in so far as it consists of the actual presence of the object to the mind aware of it, is, as we have seen, neither truth nor error; it simply is what it is. ”

“ Of Ethology, Or The Science Of The Formation Of Character.
§ 1. The laws of mind as characterized in the preceding chapter, compose the universal or abstract portion of the philosophy of human nature; and all the truths of common experience, constituting a practical knowledge of mankind, must, to the extent to which they are truths, be results or consequences of these. ”

“ In fact, no belief which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. ”

“ But the universal form in which any opinion comes to your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity, in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight. ”

“ Conceptions are distinguished on the one hand from sensation and perception, and on the other hand from the intuitions of pure reason or ideas. They are distinctly the product of thought and of the understanding, except when quite free from empirical elements. ”

“ But by what rules of logic we make these inferences, it is impossible to show, nay, it is impossible to show how our sensations and thoughts can give us the very notion and conception either of a mind or of a faculty. ”

“ All such conceptions can be viewed either as relatively valid, or as metaphysically final, only upon the basis to be established by a general theory of what constitutes our own type of knowledge. And for such a theory, — our whole present concern, — experience and reality alike contain only fulfilment of purpose, complete or incomplete, conditions of interest and attention, expressed or partially expressed in present consciousness, — acknowledgments of facts, and ignorance of facts, — beliefs, and truths related to beliefs. ”

“ It is by analogy with the exercise of intellect, and the volition, or power of moral causation, of which we are conscious within ourselves, that we speak of the Supreme Mind and Moral Cause of the Universe, of whose operation, order, arrangement and adaptation, are the external manifestations. Order implies what by analogy we call intelligence; subserviency to an observed end implies intelligence foreseeing which by analogy, we call Design. ”

“ Now in this extremely elementary consideration, namely, in the consideration that unless ideas first voluntarily bind themselves to a given task, and so, by their internal purpose, already commit themselves to a certain selection of its object, they are neither true nor false, — in this consideration, I say, there may be hidden consequences that we shall later find momentous for the whole theory of Being and of truth. ”

“ And now, finally, after surveying all these so various types of beings, we have to recall the comment often already made in these lectures, and to assert that not only these different kinds of realities, but also the concrete experiences whereby we come to observe, and the ideas whereby we ourselves define, describe, and in general undertake to know these very objects, are themselves also in their own measure real, and are as truly real as are the various finite objects of common sense that we know. ”

“ All that philosophers meant was—that we had perceptions of objects, and that these perceptions were not the objects themselves. Yet even this, the least exceptionable form of the theory that can be maintained, was found sufficient to subvert the foundations of all human certainty. ”

“ According to the view of Knowledge of which we have extracted examples above, the ideas of the mind are originally furnished to it by sensation, from which therefore are derived, not necessarily all our Thoughts, but all the materials of Discourse, all that constitutes the essence of Knowledge. ”

“ It appears then to be an undeniable fact, that from thought or sensation, all mankind, constantly and invariably, from the first dawning of reflection, do infer a power or faculty of thinking, and a permanent being or mind to which that faculty belongs ”

“ And sometimes we may know some one or more of those powers or properties,—as, for example, the desires and affections of the soul,—and be ignorant of the essence, and make it the object of investigation. ”

“ Evidently all rational beings have will as well as understanding; God wills, the Angels will, man wills. Indeed, how could knowledge progress but for the will to know? Yet of the two, considered in themselves, understanding is higher than will—
“for its object is the ratio, the very essential nature, of the desired good, while the object of will is the desired good whose ratio is in the understanding.... ”

“ The explanation in philosophical terms of thought and reality has usurped, in his opinion, the larger, more fruitful as well as more hopeful interest in the functional manifestations of the deeper, more universal and significant aspects of mind. ”

“ The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. ”

“ In some problems, for example, the analysis of space and time, the nature of perception, or the theory of judgment, the discovery of the logical form of the facts involved is the hardest part of the work and the part whose performance has been most lacking hitherto. ”

“ Any man of sense has only to open his eyes, or to observe himself within, to appreciate how all original knowledge is of the concrete, the definite, the individual. This, I say, is what the traditional method in logic seems to imply. ”

“ Thus, in attending to the fact which philosophy brings along with her, we find that consciousness and philosophy become identified,—that philosophy is a systematic or studied consciousness, and that consciousness is an unsystematic or unstudied philosophy. ”

“ And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason—not by rule, but by an inward faculty. Reasoning, then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spontaneous energy within us, not an art. ”

“ These fully developed thought-processes are marked off by the use of what is known as the general idea or notion such as man or virtue. Such general ideas when reduced to a precise form as by the logician are spoken of as concepts. And since the science of logic assumes thinking to take place by help of such conceptual products we may also speak of these full or explicit thought-processes as Conceptual Thought. ”