Faculty (mental)

“ The 633critical faculty is a product of education and training. It is a mental habit and power. It is a prime condition of human welfare that men and women should be trained in it. It is our only guarantee against delusion, deception, superstition, and misapprehension of ourselves and our earthly circumstances. It is a faculty which will protect us against all harmful suggestion. "We are all critical against the results reached by others and uncritical against our own results."2214 To act by suggestion or autosuggestion is to act by impulse. Education teaches us to act by judgment. ”

“ Many other authorities having been quoted in support of these general statements, and also for the purpose of tracing the evolution of predicative utterance in more detail, I proceeded to give illustrations of different phases of its development in the still existing languages of savages; and thus proved that they, no less than primitive man, are unable to “supply the blank form of a judgment,” or to furnish what my opponents regard as the criterion of human faculty. ”

“ Apart from the question of the ultimate sanction of moral conduct, there have always been two explanations of the mental act variously known as "ethical judgment," "moral faculty," "moral sense" or conscience. On the one side there have been those who considered that moral judgment was an emotion, an intuition, or instinctive recognition of right or wrong, which implied no rational or intellectual process beyond [Pg 10] that which is involved in registering or perceiving the fact. ”

“ But the real kernel of the phenomenon is not the inhibition but the dynamogeny;—not the abstraction of attention or imagination from other topics, but the increased power which imagination gains under suggestion;—the development of faculty, useless, if you will, in that special form of imagining the baby, but faculty mentally of a high order—faculty in one shape or another essential to the production of almost all the most admired forms of human achievement. ”

“ The perfect oneness of the personal self must be maintained, and the term faculty, when used for any form of psychical ability, must be understood simply as expressing the soul's capacity or power to do any specific form of work, or to act in any particular and distinctively definable way, as, for instance, to know, to feel, to will, to remember, to compare. ”

“ It is enough to say that he admits two rational principles, 'self-love' and the 'moral faculty,' the coincidence of which is learned only by experience. The moral faculty reveals simple 'ideas' of right and wrong, which are incapable of any further analysis. ”

“ As far back as I can remember, I find that my dominant faculty, the one that has been present in every crisis of my life, great or small, and which is present to-day, has been the faculty, I mean the power and the need of duplication. There have always been in me, as it were, two distinct persons; one who went, came, acted, felt, and another who looked at the first go, come, act, and feel with an impassable curiosity. ”

“ It is by this faculty, natural to man, that he is a moral agent, that he is a law to himself, but this faculty, I say, not to be considered merely as a principle in his heart, which is to have some influence as well as others, but considered as a faculty in kind and in nature supreme over all others, and which bears its own authority of being so. ”

“ Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them. ”

“ The moral faculty is what the school men call the “regular raglans;” the conscience is their “regular regulate;” or, to speak in more modern terms, the moral faculty performs the office of a law-giver, while the business of conscience is to perform the duty of a judge. ”

“ The faculty of which I speak is of one kind in all of us. Not to every one is given that depth of feeling, that faculty of absolute trust which will not be deceived, and the exulting masterfulness of the senses which are the mark of a fearless lover. ”

“ But what sort of philosophy is that, that thinks to explain a fact by a word? You observe such or such a penchant in an animal, such or such a taste or talent in a man; presto, a particular faculty is produced for each one of these peculiarities, and you suppose the whole matter to be settled. You deceive yourself; your faculty is only a word,—it is the name of the fact,—and all the difficulty remains just where it was before. ”

“ For, if it be reasonable to suppose and talk of faculties as distinct beings that can act, (as we do, when we say the will orders, and the will is free,) it is fit that we should make a speaking faculty, and a walking faculty, and a dancing faculty, by which these actions are produced, which are but several modes of motion; as well as we make the will and understanding to be faculties, by which the actions of choosing and perceiving are produced, which are but several modes of thinking. ”

“ Though it be true that all men have sufficient wit to pass a judgment on this or that, and not a few sufficient impudence to print the same (these last being commonly accounted critics) , I have ever held that the critical faculty is more rare than the inventive. It is a faculty your Eminence possesses in so great a degree that your praise or blame is something oracular, your utterance infallible as great genius or as a beautiful woman. ”

“ X.Remember, at anything that shall befall you, to turn to yourself, and seek what faculty you possess for making use of it. If you see a beautiful person, you will find a faculty for that, namely, Self-mastery. ”

“ The moral faculty is to the conscience, what taste is to the judgment, and sensation to perception. It is quick in its operations, and, like the sensitive plant, acts without reflection, while conscience follows with deliberate steps, and measures all her actions, by the unerring square of right and wrong. The moral faculty exercises itself upon the actions of others. ”

“ For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. ”

“ The will is sometimes spoken of by certain of these modern psychologists as mainly an inhibitory faculty, that is, a faculty which prevents certain reflex acts from taking place, though permitting one set of reflexes to have its way. ”

“ It is, therefore, important to cultivate a faculty which serves as judge between the two guides, which does not permit conscience to go astray and corrects the errors of prejudice. That faculty is reason. But what a crowd of questions arise at this word. Are women capable of solid reason; should they cultivate it, can they cultivate it successfully? ”

“ But when we approach the subject with an express view to moral culture, we must cross the field of emotional association in general by a new track.
The newly-appointed professors of the theory of education are perhaps not yet fully aware that, when they venture upon the troubled arena of moral education, they will not be able to evade the long-standing question. What is the moral faculty? ”

“ for know you, child, I have that faculty which is better than any one sense, better than a perfect body, better than courage and will, better than experience, ordinarily the best product of the longest lives—the faculty divinest of men, but which”—he stopped, and laughed again, not bitterly, but with real zest—“but which even the great do not sufficiently account, while with the herd it is a non-existent—the faculty of drawing men to my purpose and holding them faithfully to its achievement, by which, as against things to be done, I multiply myself into hundreds and thousands. ”

“ The reason, with its immediate subordinates, memory and conscience—the fancy, with its subordinates, the senses and inclinations, form six faculties of the inner man, with which the understanding and will make together eight. The ninth is the living, loving, feeling soul, which, although it be the center of the whole consciousness, must, nevertheless, be counted as an independent and peculiar faculty. ”

“ We have the power of directing our attention to the objects of sense, or of withdrawing it from these, and becoming conscious only of the working of our own mind; we have, i.e., the faculty of observation and of reflection; by the use of the word faculty—etymologically, the power of doing—we need not dismember the Subject, but think of the One person as acting in different ways. ”

“ Shrewd common-sense may be an inferior substitute for philosophy, and the faculty which brings remote objects close to the eye of an ordinary observer for the loftier faculty which tinges everyday life with the hues of mystic contemplation. ”

“ Turning now to the faculty-hypothesis, we find that it is nothing else than spiritualism under a somewhat different form. The faculty-hypothesis chops the mind into many different parts, termed faculties, one is for reading, another for speaking, another for remembering, another still for willing, and so on. Sometimes they are limited to a few, and sometimes they are multiplied to infinity. ”

“ If we are materialists because we do not admit the existence of a unit-faculty of the soul, but recognise several primitive faculties, we ask whether the ordinary division of the faculties of the soul into understanding, will, attention, memory, judgment, imagination, and [67] affections and passions, expresses nothing more than a primitive unit-faculty? ”

“ It is true that very often the enfeebling of this great faculty is due to the excessive tenderness of those who have allowed us to contract pernicious habits. Who is it that speaks to the child's will? Who teaches him how to use that faculty and resist with energy the caprices of his imagination, the passions of the heart, the empire of the senses, the seductions of the world? These are duties that the will is called on to discharge, and as long as man shall live such duties will be of daily occurrence,—hence the will is destined to be constantly called into action. ”

“ And as purity thus clears the medium, so it also assists the faculty. And that by the same general way, by composing the passions, which otherwise not only trouble and thicken the medium, but also divide and disperse the faculty. ”

“ It is the want of a clear distinction between the logical process which determines the character of an act,—the moral judgment,—and the emotion which immediately supervenes when the character of the act is determined,—the moral feeling,—that accounts for the exaggerated epithets which are often attributed to the operations of the moral faculty, and for the haste and negligence in which men are consequently encouraged to indulge, when arriving at their moral decisions. ”

“ But, at the same time, to civilize this barbarity and to control this violence, a faculty appears, common to all, authors and public: serious reflection intent to observe character. Their eyes are turned toward the inner man. ”

“ They say—and I think this commends the reality of their experience—that there is nothing abnormal or miraculous about the matter; that the faculties acquired are on the whole the result of long evolution and training, and that they have distinct laws and an order of their own. They recognise the existence of persons of a demonic faculty, who have acquired powers of a certain grade without corresponding moral evolution; and they admit the rarity of the highest phases of consciousness and the fewness of those at present fitted for its attainment. ”

“ These assumptions are, that there is an independent faculty called consciousness, and that the dictates of that faculty are infallible. But, in the first place, it is by no means certain that consciousness is a faculty ”

“ The faculty, in which women usually most excel, is that of imagination; and, when properly cultivated, it becomes the source of all that is most charming in society. Nothing you can read will so much contribute to the improvement of this faculty as poetry; which, if applied to its true ends, adds a thousand charms to those sentiments of religion, virtue, generosity, and delicate tenderness, by which the human soul is exalted and refined. ”

“ This resemblance bears on the totality of the constitution of the mind, in as far as that is necessary and universal. Now, this character of necessity and of universality belongs especially to our moral nature. The faculty of feeling can be determined differently by accidental causes: our cognitive faculties themselves depend on variable conditions: the moral faculty only has its principle in itself, and by that very fact it can best give us a general measure and a certain criterion of this resemblance. ”

“ The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the confused impressions of sense to their essential forms,—quantity, quality, relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the like; thus raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations into objects of reflection, and so makes experience possible. Without it, man's representative powers would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes; and it is therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or substantiative faculty. ”