Consciousness

“ The notice is the consciousness, and the consciousness is the notice.
Thus far, therefore, it appears, with abundant evidence that Reflection is nothing but Consciousness; and Consciousness is the having the sensations and ideas. But what will be objected is, that we not only have Ideas; but we are capable of forming the idea of that particular state of mind which exists when we have an idea. ”

“ Whichever way you turn, and whatever object you behold, that consciousness is always present to your thought,—the consciousness of a race of beings intensely original, individual, passionate, authoritative, and magnificent. ”

“ I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when I look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. ”

“ To explore the most sacred depths of the unconscious, to labor in what I have just called the subsoil of consciousness, that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as important perhaps as have been in the preceding centuries the discoveries of the physical and natural sciences. ”

“ There is, first, in the order of our consciousness and in the degree of its undeniableness, the element of our actual impressions, the flux of our consciousness as it apprehends particular sights and sounds, smells and tastes and touches; particular sensations of rest and movement, pleasure and pain, memory, judgment, and volition, a flux, “changeless in its ceaseless change.” We have so far found neither a true object for thought, nor a subject which can think. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Can the thing, then, in and for your self, be ever separated from your consciousness thereof; or can the consciousness—provided it is the actual or completely determined consciousness of the first degree—be ever separated from the thing? Can you think the thing without the consciousness of it, or an altogether determined consciousness without its thing? Does reality arise for you in any other manner than through your immersing your consciousness into its lowest degree? ”

“ These sense-impressions, perceptions, ideas, and volitions, which form, simultaneously as well as successively, the elements of soul-life, carrying consciousness upon the waves of many subconscious states, make up the reality of the subject; they are the facts of its existence, and it is the states of consciousness only, not an underlying something, the existence of which is beyond all doubt. They form the basis of all knowledge. ”

“ By the Sensation, we mean the whole state of consciousness, under an actual or present impression of sense, as in looking at the moon, in listening to music, in tasting wine. By the Idea is meant the state of mind that remains after the sensible agent is withdrawn, or that may be afterwards recovered by the force of recollection. ”

“ That is, consciousness means knowing an object, as it were; knowing something. But the word consciousness really indicates two things—subject and object. It implies the duality of existence. There is one who is the knower, the subject, the ego, the perceiver. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But what do we mean precisely by the word consciousness, and upon what ground do we refuse to attribute consciousness to the animal creation? In the first place, by consciousness we mean the notion of self; that notion of self, and that self-reference, which in man generally, though by no means invariably, accompanies his sensations, passions, emotions, play of reason, or states of mind whatsoever. ”

“ WE have now seen that, in what we call the mental world, Consciousness, there are three grand classes of phenomena, the most familiar of all the facts with which we are acquainted,—SENSATIONS, IDEAS, and the TRAIN OF IDEAS. We have examined a number of the more complicated cases of Consciousness ”

“ This consciousness of sensation, then, is the other fact contained in perception; and it is an inquiry into the nature and origin of this fact, and of it alone, that forms the true and proper problem of psychology when we are busied with the phenomena of perception; because it is this fact, and not the fact of sensation, which constitutes man's peculiar and distinctive characteristic, and lies as the foundation-stone of all the grander structures of his moral and intellectual being. ”

“ It is for the sake of the proof that it is not fundamental that we must now endeavour to decide what it is.
"Consciousness," by those who regard it as fundamental, is taken to be a character diffused throughout our mental life, distinct from sensations and images, memories, beliefs and desires, but present in all of them.* Dr. Henry Head, in an article which I quoted in Lecture III, distinguishing sensations from purely physiological occurrences, says: "Sensation, in the strict sense of the term, demands the existence of consciousness." ”

“ In all these cases what we speak of is a point of consciousness, a thing which we can describe no otherwise than by calling it a feeling; a part of that series, that succession, that flow of something, on account of which we call ourselves living or sensitive creatures. ”

“ Examples of truths known to us by immediate consciousness, are our own bodily sensations and mental feelings. I know directly, and of my own knowledge, that I was vexed yesterday, or that I am hungry to-day. ”

“ If there is one thing that may be said, in the popular estimation, to characterize mind, that one thing is "consciousness." We say that we are "conscious" of what we see and hear, of what we remember, and of our own thoughts and feelings. Most of us believe that tables and chairs are not "conscious." ”

“ I. My consciousness begins with the perception of my own state; I connect directly therewith the presentation of an object according to the principle of causality;—both of these, the consciousness of my own state, and the presentation of an object, are inseparably united, there is no intervening consciousness between them, and this one undivided consciousness is preceded by no other. ”

“ Now the difference between the narrow form of consciousness that we human beings possess and the wider and widest forms of consciousness whose reality every common-sense effort to give sense to life, and every scientific effort to discover the total verdict of experience presupposes--the difference, I say, between these two forms of consciousness is literally expressed by calling the one form (the form that we all possess) human, and by calling the other form (the form of a wider consciousness which views {267} experience as it is) superhuman. ”

“ Life was driving at brains—at its darling object: an organ by which it can attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding. ”

“ If the brutes have consciousness and no souls, then it is clear that, in them, consciousness is a direct function of material changes; while, if they possess immaterial subjects of consciousness, or souls, then, as consciousness is brought into existence only as the consequence of molecular motion of the brain, it follows that it is an indirect product of material changes. The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck. ”

“ In the first place, the assertion that consciousness exists is not the statement of a fact but the designation of a problem. What is the nature of the fact that we call consciousness? If the common-sense individual, who assents so readily to the proposition that we all know consciousness, be asked to differentiate between consciousness and the objects of consciousness, he is dazed and helpless. ”

“ The fact, as we have said before, is notorious, that the more any state of mind (a sensation or whatever else it may be) is developed, the less is there a consciousness or reference to self of that state of mind ”

“ The Fundamental Fact.—The first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on. 'States of mind' succeed each other in him. If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains' or 'it blows,' we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on. ”

“ One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; ”

“ We include in the testimony of consciousness all that which we experience in our soul, all that which affects what some call the human me, ideas, thoughts of every class, acts of the will, sentiments, sensations ”

“ How shall I make clear the difference between A where consciousness in man or cosmos begins manifestation, utterance or limitation of itself, and where consciousness is returning into itself, breaking from the limitation of form and becoming limitless once more ”

“ The first thing to notice is that consciousness must be of something. In view of this, I should define "consciousness" in terms of that relation of an image of a word to an object which we defined, in Lecture XI, as "meaning." ”

“ Presentative cognitions; or those in which consciousness is occupied in localizing a sensation impressed on the organism—occupied, that is, with the relation between this presented mental state and those other presented mental states which make up our consciousness of the part affected: as when we cut ourselves. ”

“ In its typical form then, the judgment as a mental state seems to us to begin with a relatively incomplete or unstable or disconnected mass of consciousness, which we have called the Subject, as it first begins to be present to us. ”

“ Yet it is quite possible, and indeed I think more than probable, reasoning from analogy, that the processes which present each fact, switch each point of view, or setting into consciousness, are subconscious and that what we do is chiefly to select from those which are thus brought into consciousness the ideas, settings, etc., which fulfil best the requirements of the question. ”

“ A simple instance will bring home to us how the boundaries of our consciousness are crowded with unknown impressions — unknown, because not attended to; but yet in some inexplicable way a part of our consciousness, since an effort of attention serves to bring them, any one of them, clearly into mental vision. ”

“ There remains, in the first place, the mind’s own feelings or states of consciousness, namely, its outward feelings or sensations, and its inward feelings—its thoughts, emotions, and volitions. Whether any thing else remains, or all else is inference from this; whether the mind is capable of directly perceiving or apprehending any thing except states of its own consciousness—is a problem of metaphysics not to be discussed in this place. ”

“ The soul, by the external senses, observes and analyzes the facts of the external world, and constructs by induction the physical sciences; by her internal sense, called consciousness, she observes and analyzes the world within herself, and by way of induction from the facts or phenomena she observes, constructs psychology, or the science of herself. ”

“ As if anybody ever was troubled about that. That, notoriously enough, is a fact: our consciousness is a series of feelings to which every now and then is added a retrospective consciousness that they have come and gone. ”

“ If, however, the word consciousness is taken not simply in its finite sense, as ‘the opposite of unconsciousness’, but rather as including a man’s whole awareness of his environment, the sum total of his intellectual and emotional experiences as an individual, perhaps it may serve. ”

“ This is an abstract way of dealing with consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously found; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present 'segment' or 'section' of that stream, according as we take a broader or a narrower view—both the stream and the section being concrete existences in time, and each being a unity after its own peculiar kind. ”

“ I will simply ask—What happens if we ascribe to the "originating Mind" the character absolutely essential to the conception of Mind, that it consists of a series of states of consciousness? Put a series of states of consciousness as cause, and the evolving Universe as effect, and then endeavor to see the last as flowing from the first. ”

“ But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers. “All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity,” they will say, “but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. ”

“ The well-known threefold distribution of the faculties that form the ultimate grounds of conviction will suffice for our purpose: viz., sensational consciousness revealing to us the world of matter; intuitive reason that of mind; and feeling that of emotion.98 These are the forms of consciousness which supply the material from which the reflective powers draw inferences and construct systems.
It is easy to exhibit the mental character which each would have a tendency to generate when applied to a special subject like religion, natural or revealed. ”