Cognizance

“ Heraldic emblazonment was plentifully strewed over the mantles of the nobility when they assembled on state solemnities. Nor was this ornament confined to the garments of males. Ladies delighted to appear in the cognizances of their lords, or in their own paternal bearings. Armourists that have amused themselves by treating on the curious and obsolete terms of heraldry, have supposed that the flanch and flasque represent that part of female attire which covered the body from the lower part of the neck to the waist, and that this part of the ladies' dress contained the heraldic bearing. ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say, any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ Now these fundamental determinations of consciousness, which the science of knowledge has for its object, also occur in actual perception—or rather those determinations themselves are perceptions; but the science of knowledge has them for its object in quite a different manner from that in which perception has them. Precisely as the consciousness of the real presence of your friend was related to the representation of that presence, or as the actual watch was related to the demonstration of a watch, so actual consciousness is related to the science of knowledge. ”

“ This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself—on its knowledge as well as on its object—in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely what is termed Experience. ”

“ Understanding, or the force of conceiving and combining, independently of the sensible order, is another of the data furnished by our own experience. As this is a fact of consciousness, we know it by intuition, not by abstract ideas; it is the exercise of an activity which we feel within ourselves; it is the me which we ourselves are. ”

“ In my sketchy outline of man’s spiritual life and consciousness, I set out, you will remember, with the four elementary faculties, understanding and will, reason and fancy, as the four opposite and extreme poles of the inner world. As conscience and memory presented themselves to our consideration in the progress of our inquiries, they were characterized as mediate and collateral faculties of the reason, since the conscience stands midway between reason and will, and the memory between reason and understanding. ”

“ Now this mature consideration and attentiveness of each one to what passes in his own consciousness appears to us to be so easy and natural, that it ought to require no study to find it, but should be known to every one. ”

“ How knowledge becomes possible for any intelligence, is in fact the problem how are we to think, under one of its aspects, the relation between individual consciousness and the wider sphere of reality? ”

“ Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—what you like—it must know. ”

“ If you ask what manner of partial Being, from the point of view of our Fourth Conception, such abstractly conceived but concretely excluded facts possess, I answer, precisely the fragmentary sort of Being which the consciousness of a specific purpose, that is the consciousness of a particular attentive selection, consciously assigns to them. ”

“ The knowledge that we have of ourselves is what most persons mean by consciousness, and it is what we should scientifically understand by that term, although consciousness is often used as synonymous with mental cognition of things external to ourselves, and as cognition of ourselves also. ”

“ Science, knowledge, leads to fact consciousness; religion, experience, leads to value consciousness; philosophy, wisdom, leads to co-ordinate consciousness; revelation (the substitute for morontia mota) leads to the consciousness of true reality; while the co-ordination of the consciousness of fact, value, and true reality constitutes awareness of personality reality, maximum of being, together with the belief in the possibility of the survival of that very personality. ”

“ They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding,—its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind. ”

“ Well, that same need of relating our knowledge, which operates here within the sphere of our knowledge itself, we shall find operating, also, outside that sphere. We experience, as we go on learning and knowing,—the vast majority of us experience,—the need of relating what we have learnt and known to the sense which we have in us for conduct, to the sense which we have in us for beauty. ”

“ When limitation is broken, however, when every dim stratum and substratum of our being has become conscious, and the whole consciousness is gathered up into the single tremendous act of knowledge,—not the conventionalised, formulated awareness of the senses, but direct absolute knowledge,—what is it claimed that we perceive? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thou hast a consciousness of thy seeing, feeling, &c., and thereby thou perceivest the object. Couldst thou not perceive it without this consciousness? Canst thou not recognise an object by sight or hearing, without knowing that thou seest or hearest? ”

“ Let us sum up this résumé. Setting out from the observation of ourselves in order to preserve ourselves from hypothesis, we have found in consciousness three orders of facts. We have left to each of them its character, its rank, its bearing, and its limits. Sensation has appeared to us the indispensable condition, but not{368} the foundation of knowledge. Reason is the faculty itself of knowing ”

“ In these circumstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a material object, separated from every essential relationship with us—with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. ”

“ The intellect and intelligence of man are manifested through the organs of the brain, and from these, consciousness, will memory, judgment, thought, volition, and passion, the functions of the mind, do proceed. ”

“ Apart from this general abstract form, reason, like all other things, has also its concrete, special, sense form which we perceive directly through our experience. Hence our entire process of consciousness consists in the experience of the senses, that is in the physical process, and its understanding. Understanding is the general reflection of any object. ”

“ I will hold to the viewpoint of natural thinking, which this impulse assigns to me, and renounce all those morbid speculations and refinements of the understanding which alone could make me doubt its truth. I understand thee now, sublime Spirit! [2] I have found the organ with which I grasp this reality, and with it, probably, all other reality. Knowledge is not that organ. No knowledge can prove and demonstrate itself. Every knowledge presupposes a higher as its foundation, and this upward process has no end. ”

“ These principles, based on the data of experience,—that is, on sensations the existence of which we know from consciousness, assure us that the objectiveness of sensations, or the reality of the external world, is a truth. ”

“ The whole content of consciousness might be that impression." These Impressions, with the Pleasure and Pain, are represented by him as knowledge; this without a thing knowing or a thing known. It is such knowledge with which man starts, such knowledge as man can attain, and the foundation of all other knowledge. ”

“ To explain how we get an affection of our external sense, and a power to contemplate our faculty, belongs to the sphere of pure philosophy, or the Science of Knowledge, and hence should not be undertaken in a review of the facts of consciousness. ”

“ Thy real knowledge, that of thy sensations or affections, is to thee like an imperfect knowledge, which, as thou sayest, requires to be completed by another. This other new knowledge thou conceivest and describest to thyself,—not as something which thou hast, for thou hast it not,—but as something which thou shouldst have, over and above thy actual knowledge, if thou hadst an organ wherewith to apprehend it. ”

“ Of course, the consciousness is; but, however subjective, the consciousness must have more than its mere subjectivity, than its mere seeming or wanting or willing, being in some way genuinely objective or grounded in reality. In a word, all consciousness implies and demands, postulates and possesses, a real world ”

“ I reply that, in fact, all true insight is, to my mind, rational insight, upon one or another level of the development of our power to become rational beings. But you will remember that insight, as I defined it, also means knowledge which is intimate and manifold, as well as knowledge which views facts and relations in their unity. The words intuition and experience are often used to lay stress upon that aspect of our insight which either makes it intimate or else brings it into touch with many and various facts. ”

“ Our knowledge in such cases is limited to the recognition of the confusion of the subject, and knowledge in its widest sense is the consciousness of some definite content; in this case, confusion. Here, as everywhere, knowledge is not identical with truth; knowledge is only subjective truth. ”

“ He, it seems, was able to tap that vast, hidden and unsung reservoir of knowledge which is the epitome of all that the human mind has grasped and which, though flowing through the subconscious mind of all, is available in its entirety to but few—and then in all too brief flashes. ”

“ The consideration of the mind, as one substance, capable of existing in a variety of states, according as it is variously affected, and constituting, in these different states, all the complex phenomena of thought and feeling, necessarily involves the consideration of consciousness, and of personal identity. ”

“ The immediate data of consciousness are named by some philosophers sense data, by others, presentations, by others images, and there is much controversy as to their nature and existence, but with this controversy we are not here concerned—we are seeking to make clear an obvious distinction, namely, the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. ”

“ The question how the human mind, regarded as a thing of definite or indefinite characteristics, comes to have the filling-in which we call experience, opens out, when duly considered, into the much wider problem as to the relation of any individual consciousness to the sum total of things, a relation which may be either cognitive, or practical, or religious. ”

“ Subject and object in one,—the conscious being and that of which I am conscious, gifted with intuitive knowledge and myself revealed in that intuition, the thinking mind and myself the object of the thought—inseparable, and ever present to each other. ”

“ Knowledge pulsates in me, as I receive it, communing with myself on my unquiet or tearful pillow—or as it visits me, brought on the streaming moonlight, or from the fields afire with noon-splendour, or looking at me from human eyes, and stirring round and around me in the tumult of men—Your knowledge comes in a holy stillness and chillness, as if spelt off tombstones. ”

“ We recognize here three striking results of the development of reflective consciousness in the modern world:—first, it is assumed that the objective world of knowledge can be placed within197 the experience of the individual without losing thereby its nature as an object, that all characters of that object can be presented as belonging to that experience, whether adequately or not is another question ”

“ The nous, intellect or spirit, pertains to the higher or intuitional part of the mind; the dianoia or understanding to the reasoning faculty, and the doxa, or opinion-forming power, to the faculty of investigation.—Plotinus, accepting this theory of mind, says: “Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, and illumination. ”

“ In its higher grades consciousness means awareness of the world and of ourselves, a discrimination between the self and the external world—“self-consciousness” in its proper signification: an immense subject that can only be hinted at to children. ”

“ It was so in my training. We seek to silence all opinions, all half-truths, all thinking, in fact, in order to Know. We postulate, of course, a center of Spontaneous Knowledge, or Genius, above the mind. ”

“ This imagery and representation of the qualities of the things without, is that which we call our conception, imagination, ideas, notice, or knowledge of them; and the faculty, or power by which we are capable of such knowledge, is that I here call cognitive power, or conceptive, the power of knowing or conceiving.” “All the qualities called sensible are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth on our organs diversely. Neither in us that are pressed are they anything else but divers motions; for motion produceth nothing but motion. ”