Independence of mind

“ We must have faith in this impulse to independence, which is the very innermost secret of our nature. Thought is not supreme, but is founded on our striving energies. Unhesitating acceptance of our vocation and of the conditions implied in it—through this only has life reality for us. ”

“ Men say to themselves and to one another, "Yes, I shall be freer to act, I shall be nobler in my action, but I shall certainly enchain mind and spirit, I shall certainty bind myself to think, away from the rich freedom of thought in which I have been inclined to live." ”

“ The motley and confused intermixture of sensuous and spiritual impulses shall no longer rule the world: mind alone, freed from sensuous impulse, shall assume the guidance of human affairs. That this spirit might have liberty to develope itself, and rise to independent existence, our blood was shed. ”

“ We must see further than finite forms to gain the true sense of existence. And where shall we look to rest the gaze in the unsearchable realm of Mind? Let us look where we would walk, act as we would act in the possession of all power to create our own destiny. ”

“ And apart from such conscious selection, apart from such ideal predetermination of the object on the part of the idea, apart from such free voluntary submission of the idea to its self-imposed task, the object itself, the fact world, in its independence, can do nothing either to confirm or refute the idea. ”

“ The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over himself and over fate, has sunk right down to his innermost depths, and has become an instinct, a dominating instinct—what name will he give to it, to this dominating instinct, if he needs to have a word for it? ”

“ Averse to the common will and to the law of the land, I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit rising out of the solitude. Up to a certain point this hypothesis is verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes actual. But even then I do not act as a particular being: it is the universal power that acts through my personal will. ”

“ As will, the mind is aware that it is the author of its own conclusions, the origin of its self-fulfilment. Thus fulfilled, this independency or individuality form the side of existence or of reality for the Idea of mind. ”

“ Now if, with this fact in mind, I look back on the world which I attempted thus to describe, I find that the limitation which experience often seems to set to my postulates about the discrimination of facts, may well be founded in the deepest nature of things. The true world, the World of Values or of Appreciation, as rightly viewed by an absolute insight, would be a world of Selves, forming in the unity of their systems One Self. ”

“ The initial step, then, consists in determining to picture the Universal Mind as the ideal of all we could wish it to be both to ourselves and to others, together with the endeavour to reproduce this ideal, however imperfectly, in our own life ”

“ What mind, regulated by the ordinary principles of human belief, can possibly hold that every one of the thousand vital points which swim in a drop of stagnant water are inherently fitted to maintain their individuality throughout eternity? ”

“ Here, too, from the purely material point of view, the ideal, as in the animal organism, is complete loss of independent life—the complete merging of the individual independence into the common life of society—the identification of individual life with social function. ”

“ In the sphere where no one can deprive us of the freedom to do as we think best—in our own minds let us make ourselves a pattern, a prophecy, and a guarantee of that which will become a reality when we are gone. ”

“ Can this reason or rational will in man stand and work of itself? Is it so constructed as to be independent? No. Just as truly as a man's bodily forces are drawn from sources outside himself, so his spiritual being depends on sources and motives beyond himself. ”

“ We must commence, then, by liberating our ordinary consciousness from the control or domineering action of outward objects. Thus commencing at the very circumference of man, we shall clear out an enlarged atmosphere of freedom around that true and sacred centre of his personality—his character, namely, as a moral and accountable agent. ”

“ We now inquire, How can we distinguish a phenomenon in our experience produced by necessity, from a phenomenon produced by freedom?
I can by no means be immediately conscious of a freedom which exists out of myself, I cannot even be conscious of a freedom which exists within myself, that is, of my own freedom; for essential freedom is the first condition of consciousness, and hence cannot lie within its sphere of observation. ”

“ Such a freedom is a freedom made and acquired, the work of the mind's self-realisation, not to be taken as a given fact of consciousness which must be believed66. To have a will—in other words, to have freedom, is the consummation—and let us add, only the formal or ideal consummation—of a process by which man raises himself out of his absorption in sensation and impulse, establishes within himself a mental realm, an organism of ideas, a self-consciousness, and a self. ”

“ All the deep-lying powers of the inward self, usually so divergent and conflicting—the foreground purposes defeated by background inhibitions, and by doubts on the border,—become liberated and unified into one conscious life which is not merely intellectual, nor merely volitional, nor solely emotional, but an undivided whole of experience, intensely joyous, enriched with insight and pregnant with deeds of action. ”

“ And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom. That naive, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man's will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. ”

“ In this realm it does, then, in the long run, make a difference to all objects, divine or material, whether they are known or not, by any being. That a relative independence, and that both individuality and freedom have their concrete meaning in this truer realm, we shall indeed in due season learn. But what we now learn is that any definition of absolutely independent beings, beings that could change or vanish without any result whatever for their fellows, is, in all regions of the universe, natural or spiritual, a hopeless contradiction. There are no such mutually indifferent beings. ”

“ Now the sort of 'fact of experience' on which in my book I have proposed to compromise, is the so-called 'mental state,' in whose existence not only common men but philosophers have uniformly believed. ”

“ They have ceased to be the highest ideals. The period of habituating morality and making it habitual is ceasing; and the passion to realize freedom, to act on personal experience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. To act occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal motives develops the impulse and the joy of pure obligation, and thus brings some new and original force into the world and makes habitual guidance by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer constraint, the practical rule of life. ”

“ Begin with recognizing the great truth that you are an individual, that you are rightfully sole owner of your own mind, of your own brain capacity. Let no outside influence enthrall you; break your chains, set your mind at liberty, and it will soon work out the salvation of the body. When once you can see that there are fetters the desire to break them will come; the effort to break them will follow the desire. ”

“ The exercise, manifestation, expression of this consciousness through a freedom secured in the way described is necessary to its real existence, just as language of some sort is necessary to the real existence of thought, and bodily movement to that of the soul. ”

“ These breadths draw out the soul; we feel that we have wider thoughts than we knew; the soul has been living, as it were, in a nutshell, all unaware of its own power, and now suddenly finds freedom in the sun and the sky. ”

“ They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the real self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely different system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of our interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central parts of consciousness. ”

“ It rests upon a feeling inherent in every conscious individual, the feeling of dependence which every man experiences with respect to universal being. Which of us can escape this feeling of absolute dependence? ”

“ I content myself now with claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to the extent which I have just defined—that it is the real cause of its own actions. It is capable of self-determination. ”

“ Is not experience more than any one idea or any one ideal? Being really alive, is it not infinitely more than this or that thing, than this or that place or time, than this or that power or will, than this or that point of view? And, if more, what so surely as universal duplicity and self-opposition can ensure at once its vitality and its integrity? ”

“ In this lecture, then, I shall henceforth take the realistic type of independence literally, and as a total independence. How alone a modified Realism can be stated, we shall see in connection with our Third Conception of Being. For the time, our realist shall be supposed to say, as many do, “Knowledge makes no difference to its real outer Object.” ”

“ We saw above that the mere sensuous individuality, even without any appearance of the moral law in consciousness, makes actual acting completely possible, and real freedom, the possibility of determining one's self to do a specific act, in every way perfectible. ”

“ This process, prejudicial to our mental operations, commences in the early stages of our existence, and proceeds with a regularity of mischievous consequences, to the period when man assumes the dignity of intellectual independence; and fortunate indeed is that individual who arrives to this elevated predicament of mental existence. ”

“ Even our own sense of the mind's living unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each other. ”

“ And the reason is that, either through ignorance or carelessness, we have surrendered our position of control over the system as a whole, and have lost the element of Purpose, around which the consciousness of individuality must always centre. Every state of our consciousness, whether active or passive, should be the result of a distinct purpose adopted by our own free will ”

“ The hope of becoming more and more rational, of making ourselves more and more independent of external things, nay, of ourselves, we could not give up. The word freedom sounds so beautiful, that we cannot do without it, even though it designates an error. ”

“ We think that the mind is an independent force, dealing with intellectual products, weighing opposing motives, estimating moral qualities, resisting some tendencies, strengthening others, forming resolves, deciding upon its own course of action and carrying out its chosen designs accordingly. ”

“ I am, indeed, conscious of myself as an independent, and, in many occurrences of my life, a free being; but this consciousness may easily be explained on the principles already laid down, and may be thoroughly reconciled with the conclusions which have been drawn. ”

“ This stern independence of intellect combined with a complete dependence on others for the emotional life, gives the characteristic tone throughout her life, and we are continually coming across a severe philosophical disquisition side by side with an outburst of uncontrollable affection or longing. ”

“ For the purpose of greater lucidity, it has usually been found that this dual aspect of mind can be best expressed by treating the whole mental organization as consisting of two minds, each endowed with separate and distinct attributes and powers; each capable, under certain conditions, of independent action. It may be that a truer idea would be conveyed if the mind-whole was described as possessing certain attributes and powers under some conditions, and certain other attributes and powers under other conditions. ”

“ True, the intellect, which is an individual acquisition, is sloughed off by death, while the will is given its freedom again. “The will of man, in itself individual, separates itself in death from the intellect,” so that new generations get new intellects. ”

“ And the shock of having to transvalue all the accepted values, of having, in a world organized on the basis of fear, to conceive of a world organized on the basis of good will, made him a thinker in his own right. ”

“ God organized us to become absolutely independent, and the will I am speaking about is implanted in us by him; and the spirit of every intelligent being is organized to become independent according to its capacity. ”

“ A 'given' world can never be primary. [3] There must be a mind behind it. We fall back, therefore, upon the principle which must be postulated in the whole discussion—the unity and self-determining activity of the self-conscious mind.
II We may now proceed to the second problem of the will, the objection that human action is determined by motives, and that what we call freedom is nothing else than the necessary result of the pressure of motives upon the will. In other words, the conduct of the individual is always determined by the strongest motive. ”

“ In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master, we see, on their phenomenal side, the emergence of man's social life and the commencement of political union. Force, which is the basis of this phenomenon, is not on that account a basis of right, but only the necessary and legitimate factor in the passage from the state of self-consciousness sunk in appetite and selfish isolation into the state of universal self-consciousness. ”