Intentionality

“ The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. ”

“ For that other question—how rightly to estimate a human being; what constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish, without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their shallowness and injustice—that is a problem for us, for the solution of which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any recognised guidance whatsoever. ”

“ If we speak of a 'true' instinct, a 'sound' or 'healthy' feeling of distrust, a 'true' sense of beauty or of the divine, our use of such epithets is proleptic. The 'true' instinct is one which may be converted into a reasoned knowledge. ”

“ We should bear in mind, also, that they are influenced, like ourselves, by association of ideas, and that savages, whose psychology should stand nearer to theirs than our own, often confound the subjective with the objective—the idea of a thing in their mind, that is to say, with the thing itself, outside it. ”

“ Five senses to detect things near,
Is this the whole that we are here?
Rules baffle instincts—instinct rules,
Wise men are bad—and good are fools,
Facts evil—wishes vain appear,
We cannot go, why are we here? ”

“ To make you understand the way in which suggestion acts in the treatment of moral taints I will use the following comparison. Suppose our brain is a plank in which are driven nails which represent the ideas, habits, and instincts, which determine our actions. If we find that there exists in a subject a bad idea, a bad habit, a bad instinct,--as it were, a bad nail, we take another which is the good idea, habit, or instinct, place it on top of the bad one and give a tap with a hammer--in other words we make a suggestion. ”

“ The dead abstract notions of the intellect, the dialectical disputes of the reason, the purely subjective and one-sided apprehension of objects by a deluded fancy, and the absolute will, are the four sources of human error. ”

“ From this, it necessarily follows, that between none of our ideas is the association more intimate and intense, than between antecedent and consequent, in the order of events. Whenever we perceive an event, the mind instantly flies to its antecedent. I hear words in the street; event: some one, of course, is making them; antecedent. My house is broken, and my goods are gone; event: a thief has taken them; antecedent. This is that remarkable case of association, in which the combination is inseparable; a case of so much importance in explaining some of the more mysterious phenomena of thought. ”

“ We are puzzled now to comprehend how that which was independent has been induced to leave its path. We begin to seek the cause which forces it to exert and to suffer influence; and, with this, we are well on the road to false theory and ruinous error. ”

“ How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality! ”

“ It is their preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, and false. ”

“ We can recover the genuine import of ideals and idealism only by disentangling this unreal mixture of thought and emotion. The action of deliberation, as we have seen, consists in selecting some foreseen consequence to serve as a stimulus to present action. ”

“ A third doctrine, finding sensation insufficient, and also discontented with reason, which it confounds with reasoning, thinks to approach common sense by making science, art, and ethics rest on sentiment. It would have us confide ourselves to the instinct of the heart, to that instinct, nobler than sensation, and more subtle than reasoning. ”

“ For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity—that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives. ”

“ Sense-deceptions, faulty observation, distraction, exaggeration, illusion, fallacy, and error are not idle abstract fancies of the psychologist, but stern realities; and their existence emphasizes the need in the determination of truth and the maintenance of a sound rationality, of a calm, unprejudiced judgment, of an experienced and balanced intelligence, of a discerning sense for nice distinctions, of an appreciation of the circumstances under which it is peculiarly human to err. ”

“ Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessary to our own errors. ”

“ But it is the essence of Intuitionism to suppose that rules of action—statements not of what ought to be, but of what we ought to do—are in the same sense intuitively certain. Plausibility has been lent to this view by the fact that we do undoubtedly make immediate judgments that certain actions are obligatory or wrong: we are thus often intuitively certain of our duty, in a psychological sense. ”

“ This theory of intuition or instinct, then, I take, as I have already said, to be in the nature of a subterfuge on the part of the male—a sop to his conscience, and a plausible excuse for assuming that we have not the intelligence which (if it were once admitted that we possessed it) we should have the right to cultivate by independent thinking. ”

“ Where instinct and reason do sometimes conflict is in regard to single beliefs, held instinctively, and held with such determination that no degree of inconsistency with other beliefs leads to their abandonment. Instinct, like all human faculties, is liable to error. ”

“ It must be, at least, allowed, that this “ruling passion,” antecedent to reason and observation, must have an object independent on human contrivance; for there can be no natural desire of artificial good. ”

“ You invariably lead me into the realms of speculation, and then throw me upon the defensive by asking me to prove my own theories, or with apparent sincerity, you advance an unreasonable hypothesis, and then, before I am aware of your purpose, force me to acquiesce because I can not find facts to confute you. ”

“ It is the power by which the intellect considers many judgments in such rapid succession that they appear to be simultaneous.
Heretofore, in discussing sensation, perception, and apprehension, the effect has been subjective and the cause objective, but in apprehension these relations of cause and effect are sometimes reversed, and the cause may be subjective and the effect objective. I am conscious not only when another strikes me, but I am conscious when I strike another. Here we have a consciousness of cause, and the effect is inferred. ”

“ Should I, he said, attribute to instinct or to some kind of illusion the fact that when we see those places in which we are told notable men spent much of their time, we are more powerfully affected than when we hear of the exploits of the men themselves or read something written? ”

“ I can only justify them in reason by showing that human nature responds to them, and forbids me to reject them in my actions, on pain of being judged a lunatic, whatever I may say in my speculative theories. 'Such original and natural judgments,' he says, 'are part of the furniture which nature hath given to the human understanding. ”

“ And here we may pause to observe how the strange contradictions that are found in the human character frequently produce a line of conduct which would, at first sight, appear irreconcilable with all probability, and yet which is in strict accordance with the secret workings of the wayward will by which it is directed. ”

“ The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its own all-sufficient voucher and justification. ”

“ Might not an illusion lurk in the highest interpretation of the word objectivity? We understand by it a certain standpoint in the historian, who sees the procession of motive and consequence too clearly for it to have an effect on his own personality. ”

“ If there is thus no theoretical certainty of the future with a systematic principled character, how will it be when the habituated self involves contradictions? Here we must guess by analogy, but we can do no more than guess. The act depends on the whole conscious and unconscious self ”

“ To suppose that reason permits itself to be governed by passions or tempers, but is not the immediate agent of all that is done by them, is as absurd, as to suppose that reason permits itself to be governed by the hand when it is writing falsly, or the tongue, when it is talking profanely, but it is not the immediate, direct agent of all that is written and spoken by them. ”

“ Such startling revivals, often repeated, challenge attention, and though thoughtful men have given much attention to the phenomena, it has resulted in a very imperfect psychology of association and symbolism. ”

“ Our whole natural thinking, as shall be distinctly proved in the body of this work, consists of a series of judgments, each of which involves a mental contradiction,—in other words, controverts a necessary truth or law of reason. ”

“ But actions proceed from thoughts; we act as we think. Why should we, then, so cautiously guard our actions from impropriety while we give a loose rein to our thoughts, which so certainly, sooner or later, produce their fruits in our actions? ”

“ In this sense human will may be thought of as the cause of human activities or conscious omissions; for activities and conscious omissions are, from a psychological point of view, nothing but successions of ideas. ”

“ But it is certain that a good or bad character exists only then when its maxims of desire and action express themselves in fact. The emphasis must be on the fact; what is factual may be discovered, and these discoveries may be of use. ”

“ Confusion of Cause and Effect.—Unconsciously we seek the principles and opinions which are suited to our temperament, so that at last it seems as if these principles and opinions had formed our character and given it support and stability, whereas exactly the contrary has taken place. Our thoughts and judgments are, apparently, to be taken subsequently as the causes of our nature, but as a matter of fact our nature is the cause of our so thinking and judging. ”

“ What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it. ”

“ We have to consider only that adduction of facts and explanation, simple or complex, in a more or less skilful, intentional or unintentional manner, by means of which we are convinced at least for a moment. ”

“ The instincts, to which so much importance is attached, differ in the most bewildering manner. What one person’s instinct pronounces lawful and [Pg 167] becoming, another finds revolting. Assumptions are made, and a fabric of argument is built up upon data which are unverified, and which it is at present impossible either to verify or absolutely to contradict. ”

“ I put reason into things that are essentially instinctive. The truth is that the wanderings of desire have no single drive. All sorts of motives come in, high and low, down to sheer vulgar imitativeness and competitiveness. ”

“ These facts themselves, in so far as they remain merely immediate, are an obstacle to the idealizing process. We say that they confuse or puzzle us. On the other hand, these very facts, on occasion, may arise in consciousness only to fuse at once or very quickly with our ideas. ”

“ The literary instinct, of almost equal disorder with dramatic instinct, and which he had come to despise during the past year, returned with the easy conformity of an undesirable acquaintance—that reportorial sentence-making faculty, strong as death, and as uncentering to the soul of man. ”

“ But the natural desires and affections spontaneously carry and deposit their interests in consciousness, where also immoral aims make themselves naturally at home: the good or bad character would thus express the definite being of the will, which would be known, and that most immediately, in the interests and aims. ”

“ And, finally, there was the lure of unexplored possibilities, not only material and external, but psychological not only touching what others might do or what might happen to them, but raising also speculation as to what he might do, or what might happen to him at his own hands ”

“ We now avail ourselves of the assistance of this antagonism,—which has thus been established as fact by experience,—in order to displace the false fact generally, we might say universally, assumed in our current metaphysics, namely, that consciousness, or the fact and notion denoted by the word "I," comes into manifestation at the bidding, and under the influence, of the objects which induce the sensations accompanying it. ”

“ Here, too, all the well-authenticated cases establish a totally different conclusion. They prove that the will or spiritual power of the mesmerist has of itself no ascendency or control whatsoever over the body or mind of his victim. ”