Faculty (mind)

“ The faculty of perceiving evidence is therefore the triumph both of sound judgment in itself and of a freedom of mind which, supposing probity, scrupulousness, and courage, and perhaps the most difficult of all courage, supposes a profound and vigorous morality. ”

“ Each faculty does its own work, and when it becomes a controlling quantity, it gives tone to the whole character of the man.
But these are all of the natural mind. They do the work of this world, each in its own sphere. Ascending above them, on a higher mental plane, there is a faculty which takes note of what is above nature. It is the spiritual faculty or mind. When this degree or faculty is in conscious activity, we think of, and interest ourselves in, spiritual things. ”

“ This faculty of the mind, when it is exercised immediately about things, is called judgment ; when about truths delivered in words, is most commonly called assent or dissent : which being the most usual way, wherein the mind has occasion to employ this faculty, I shall, under these terms, treat of it, as least liable in our language to equivocation. ”

“ The other faculty, to which, in combination with his subtlety of understanding, the excellence of his advocacy may be attributed, is one more rarely possessed— and scarcely ever in such association— the entire singleness of a mind equally present in every part of a cause. ”

“ The superior faculty is therefore the more thorough organisation of that which is elsewhere less harmoniously systematised. Opinion is fragmentary and partial: it begins abruptly and casually from the unknown, and runs off no less abruptly into the unknown. ”

“ And the most natural place of the irascible faculty seems to be in the middle of the other two. For it is the nature of reason to govern, and of the irascible faculty both to govern and be governed, since it is obsequious to reason, and commands the appetitive faculty when this is disobedient to reason. And as in letters the semi-vowels are middling between mutes and vowels, having something more than those and less than these; so in the soul of man, the irascible faculty is not purely passive, but hath often an imagination of good mixed with the irrational appetite of revenge. ”

“ If imagination be a faculty by which we say that an image of some kind, and that not merely in the sense of a metaphor, is called up within us, then it is to be ranged among those faculties or powers, such as feeling, opinion, knowledge, mind, by which we form judgments and determine what may be true or false.
It is clear from what follows, that imagination is not sensation ; for sensation is either a faculty or an act, such as sight, and seeing, but an image is sometimes apparent to us without either faculty or act, as phantoms in dreams for instance ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is still more impressive when we consider that we have a moral faculty; for it is the very object and business of this faculty to deal with right and wrong, good and evil; the facts and magnitudes of which are obvious in the course of nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, can you establish any such difference between man's intellectual and moral powers, as will justify you, while acknowledging that you must use the one, in neglecting the other? Can you give any reason why you need not use the faculty which undoubtedly you possess of distinguishing between right and wrong, and the faculty, let us say, of "using the imagination in matters of science." ”

“ Yet more, and worse than that, you have been no thoughtless day-laborer; you have fully and entirely belonged to us; you were, in fact, a scholar, from whose learning many with higher pretensions have frequently taken counsel. You not only treasured in your mind a mass of rare knowledge, but you well comprehend the thoughts to which such knowledge gives rise. You were all this--and yet a forger. With true devotion and self-denial, you united malicious willfulness; you were a confidential and assiduous assistant, and at the same time a deceiver, bold and mocking like a devil. ”

“ Still less can you take the report of the Moral Faculty from the confessions of the cradle, or from the quarrels and affections of the apes; the conditions being not yet present for the bare conception of a moral problem. The most that can be asked of an intuition is, that it shall keep pace with the cases as they arise, and be on the spot when it is wanted; and if you would know what provision our nature holds for dealing with its Duty and interpreting its guilt, you must go into the thick of its moral life, and bid it tell you what it sees from the swaying tides of temptation and of victory. ”

“ But when we pass beyond the mere power of acting, to the additional power of surveying or inspecting an act, and of forming an estimate of its relations to moral law, we find a faculty in man that makes him differ in kind from the brute. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A faculty in excess is one which the conditions of existence do not afford full exercise to; and a faculty that is deficient is one from which the conditions of existence demand more than it can perform. ”

“ The reality of a faculty is not disproved by its fallibility. Finiteness, limitation and consequent incompetence to exclude mistake or only partial discernment, are no reason for denying the existence of any faculty within the range of its given action and real discriminations. The very errors that appear in its action are at once evidence of its existence and proof of limitations which harmonize it with the aggregate human psychology. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not properly avarice that makes men sordid; it is not ambition that makes them restless; it is not bribery that makes men sell their consciences; it is not interest that makes them lye, and cheat, and perjure themselves. What is it therefore? Why it is that absolutely perfect faculty, which our author sets up as the unerring standard of all that is wise, holy, and good; it is reason, the use of reason, human reason, that does all this. ”

“ For which reason, we hope, that learned faculty, for whom we have so profound a respect, will pardon us the violent hands we have been necessitated to lay on several words and phrases, which of right belong to them, and without which our descriptions must have been often unintelligible. ”

“ But we may observe that the existence and universality of the conception of duty and right cannot be doubted, however men may differ as to its original or derivative nature. All men are perpetually led to form judgments concerning actions, and emotions which lead to action, as right or wrong; as what they ought or ought not to do or feel. There is a faculty which approves and disapproves, acquits or condemns the workings of our other faculties. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In one faculty, at least, there can be no dispute of the gentleman's superiority over me, and most other men; and that is, the faculty of entangling a subject so that neither himself, or any other man, can find head or tail to it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ First, that the conscience, being a complex faculty or power, its particular judgments of duty in particular cases, being judgments of application of the principle of rightness, are reached often through very complex processes, in which the obscuration of imperfect information, or misconception of the relations involved, or the misleading effect of prejudice created by wrong training, or some falsely imagined divine authority, may leave not only a state of doubt as to duty, but throw the decision into error. ”