Faculty (psychology)

“ This explanation by a 'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done: we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if, by faculty, you mean a principle of explanation of our general power to recall, your psychology is empty. The associationist psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of recollection ”

“ In point of fact, it grows by stages, pari passu with the growth of self-consciousness. But, if so, where the faculty of stating a truth perceived passes into the higher faculty of perceiving the truth as true, there must be a continuous series of gradations connecting the one faculty with the other. Up to the point where this series of gradations begins, we have seen that the mind of an animal and the mind of a man are parallel, or not distinguishable from each other by any one principle of psychology. ”

“ A portion of the brain competent to be the adequate seat of such a faculty would needs be an entire brain in miniature,—just as the faculty itself is really a specification of the entire man, a sort of homunculus. ”

“ Now, this is admitted by all my opponents who understand the psychology of the subject. Moreover, they allow that if once this chasm of predication were bridged, there would be no further chasm to cross. For it is universally acknowledged that, from the simplest judgment which it is possible to make—and, therefore, from the simplest proposition which it is possible to construct—human intelligence displays an otherwise uninterrupted ascent through all the grades of excellence which it afterwards presents. Here, therefore, we had carefully to consider the psychology of predication. ”

“ Moreover, as previously remarked, so far as this our analysis is concerned, we have only to deal with the psychology of self-consciousness: we are not concerned with its philosophy. Now, as a matter of psychology, no one can possibly dispute that the faculty in question is one of gradual development; that during the first two or three years of the growing intelligence of man there is no vestige of any such faculty at all; that when it does begin to dawn, the human mind is already much in advance of the mind of any brute ”

“ There is no more pre-eminent example for exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as principles of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important a faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your help. ”

“ According to the results of this exercise, the pupils may be rated in a memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made known.
Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its consensus in the working whole. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If once the genesis of conceptual thought from non-conceptual antecedents be rendered apparent, the great majority of competent readers at the present time would be prepared to allow that the psychological barrier between the brute and the man is shown to have been overcome. Consequently, I have allotted what might otherwise appear to be a disproportionate amount of space to my consideration of this the origin of human faculty—disproportionate, I mean, as compared with what has afterwards to be said touching the development of human faculty in its several branches already named. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ Falconer,' I said. 'You must have a great faculty for places.'
'I think rather the contrary,' he answered. 'But there is no end to the growth of a faculty, if one only uses it—especially when his whole nature is interested in its efficiency, and makes demands upon it. The will applies to the intellect; the intellect communicates its necessities to the brain; the brain bestirs itself, and grows more active; the eyes lend their aid ”

“ 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. ”

“ In other words, in order to think the faculty, are we not forced to have recourse to the notion of the very object which we professed to have left out of our account in framing our conception of the faculty? Most assuredly, the faculty and the object exist in an ideal unity, which cannot be dissolved by any exertion of thought.
Again, perhaps you will maintain that the faculty of hearing may be thought of as something which exists anterior to the existence or application of sound ”

“ FACULTY.—Man is born faculty and inclination; faculty to know, and inclination to love, 134. The faculty of understanding and growing wise as of himself, was implanted in man by creation, 444. The faculty of knowing, of understanding, and of growing wise, receives truths, whereby it has science, intelligence, and wisdom, 122. ”

“ Thus, in passing from the few advanced ones in the beginning to that stage where it becomes the common possession of all, a faculty requires many thousands of years for its perfection, and especially has this been true in the past history of the development of human faculties. ”

“ I hope not all those who have received the degree of doctor from some philosophical faculty, or who have printed something which they call philosophical, or who, perhaps, are themselves members of some philosophical faculty? ”

“ But whosoever shall seriously consider, how little satisfaction the definition of a faculty given by either Philosophers or Physicians, will bring to a clear understanding, may easily perceive, that distinct parts are commonly taken to be faculties. ”

“ The Practical Faculty of Action.—The active Faculty of the Human Mind, as the Faculty of Desire in its widest sense, is the Power which man has, through his mental representations, of becoming the cause of objects corresponding to these representations. The capacity of a Being to act in conformity with his own representations, is what constitutes the Life of such a Being. ”

“ No faculty or organ is properly fitted for its appointed work till it has trained itself, or been trained, into a possibility of rhythmic action; and education means chiefly the bringing one faculty after another into subjection to this cosmic law. ”

“ But say that reason is the universal faculty, the faculty of truth as it exists for all intelligence, and that sense and understanding are divisions of the particular faculty, that is, of the faculty of truth as it exists for some, but not for all intelligence, and light breaks in upon the distinction. You perceive that the faculty which is conversant with truth for all must be different from the faculty which deals merely with truth for some; and perceiving that, you obtain an insight into the distinction between sense and understanding on the one hand, and reason on the other hand ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not all the faculties of the larger self—for instance, the faculty involved in telepathic action—seem to be adapted for ready employment here on earth. Which would argue, of course, for a future state in which, freed from all hampering limitations of the body, such faculties will have full manifestation. ”

“ More briefly, the faculty of experience, the faculty of representation, and the faculty of intelligence." But experience is not a faculty; it is the result of the exercise of all our faculties, and a source of intelligence. Intelligence, as a faculty, is the intellect itself; as a fact, it is indistinguishable from experience, which is improperly restricted by some psychologists of the inductive sort to the knowledge of the external world through the senses, but extends to all acquired knowledge, whatever the faculty exercised in acquiring it or the object perceived. ”

“ The relation of the mind to a study is determined by the nature of the mind and the nature of the study, and there seems to be no reason in psychology why a college-preparatory subject should be taught differently to one fitting for the duties of life. ”

“ Nevertheless, these men must have been capable, in however undeveloped a degree, of truly conceptual ideation: and this proves how unsafe it would be to argue from the absence of distinctively conceptual terms to the poverty of conceptual faculty among any people whose root-words may have come down to us—although, no doubt, in such a case we appear to be getting within a comparatively short distance of the origin of this faculty. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In other words, without at present disputing whether we have to do with a distinction of kind or of degree, I say, and say confidently, [168] that the distinction in question—i.e. between animal and human intelligence—may be easily proved to occur further back than at the faculty of predication, or the forming of a proposition. The distinction occurs at the faculty of denomination, or the bestowing of a name, known as such. “The simplest element of thought” is not a “judgment:” the simplest element of thought is a concept. ”

“ He may be draining either the physical vitality of his pupils, or those intellectual faculties which are not needed for the pursuit of his own subject, or the moral faculties, especially those for the exercise of which school-life affords no great scope, but which will be needed for the conduct of adult life. Now when a faculty is thus passively drained at second hand, it suffers the same loss of force as if it were itself exercised ”