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“ When you have developed your latent powers, questions may, of course, be put to you by one of those present, but even then in a very gentle, or low and slow tone of voice; never suddenly, or in a forceful manner. ”

“ On the other hand, the very mental activity which employs itself upon the attempt to account for an unexplained phenomenon is a sign of attention; and where there is the attention to speculate, there is likely to be the desire to transmit. ”

“ Thomas Brown, in one of his Introductory Lectures, “all is in a state of constant and ever-varying complexity, and a single sentiment may be the slow result of innumerable feelings. There is not a single pleasure, or pain, or thought, or emotion, that may not, by the influence of that associating principle which is afterwards to come under our consideration, be so connected with other pleasures, or pains, or thoughts, or emotions, as to form with them, for ever after, an union the most intimate. ”

“ I employ this word “tendency” as synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires; it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis, the root of 3the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are satisfied or opposed. ”

“ Thus, whether expressing in natural action one's own thoughts and feelings, or those excited by his conception of others, the relation of thought and feeling to action, is, in both the same. Consequently, every outacting of one's own mental states, becomes when natural and in earnest, dramatic. ”

“ As a part of the phenomenon, the lack of sociability or emotional rapport will be well known to you all, this representing a striking disturbance of the function of reality. Through considerable psychological study of these patients we discovered, that this lack of adaptation to reality is compensated by a progressive increase in the creation of phantasies. ”

“ In perception does the outward reality actually appear, extended as it really is, without any unextended medium interposed, exactly as the internal reality of a pain or a pleasure appears without a medium, when I am conscious of being pained or pleased? ”

“ In that parent, and in many preceding generations, the faculty to express that quality may have slept entirely without effect, but when there comes into the line an ego which possesses the quality, the faculty to express it leaps out from the dormant into the active condition, and we have a case of what is called reversion to a remote type. ”

“ And it follows from what we have said of thought (p. 262) that the sentiment is a rare experience. Just as there are many apparent judgements that are not really thought at all, so there are many apparent sentiments that are based upon borrowed judgements, and have never been anything more than feeling-attitudes, [292] more or less explicit; and just as secondary lapses into derived primary attention, so will a true sentiment lapse, with time and repetition, into a feeling-attitude. ”

“ It is sometimes assumed that if we can show how thoughts have grown up—if we can point to the psychical antecedents of which they are the natural consequents—we may conclude that the thoughts in question are really compounds containing their antecedents as latent elements. ”

“ It is this chronic mental habit that broods upon the problem of subjective experiences, and is ready to recognize in signs and omens the guiding principle of rationality; not that this is always done designedly and superstitiously, but the underlying bent obscures the consideration of experience in any other than a personal light, and obstructs that illumination of the concrete by the generic, which constitutes an indispensable factor in the growth of wholesome thought. ”

“ It is on this distinction that the introspective psychologist bases the attempt to give a psychological analysis and description of the contents of experience. To analyze and describe the facts of consciousness is to bring the marginal constituents of experience into the white light of attention. Analysis and description are possible just because experience is so largely a welter of elements that disguise their identity and character. ”

“ By this mechanism we can explain the dissociation of large systems of sentiments leaving a contracted personality—a mere extract of its former self—dissociated and distinguished from what it was by different sentiments, instincts and other innate dispositions. [248] The facts seem to show that the awakening of the emotional impulses of certain sentiments inhibits, not only those particular antagonistic sentiments with which the former are incompatible, but large systems of sentiments, and many instincts and other innate dispositions with which the inhibited sentiments are systematized. ”

“ Some mediums are said to act in one manner when they are obsessed, and in an entirely different manner when in their normal condition. What futile rubbish! Who knows when they are in their normal condition, or what their normal condition really is? ”

“ Surely not the psychological fact; for our inveterate love of relating and comparing things does not alter the intrinsic qualities or nature of the things compared, or undo their absolute givenness. And surely not the physiological fact; for the length of time during which we can feel or attend to a quality is altogether irrelevant to the intrinsic constitution of the quality felt. ”

“ Sensation, therefore, produces concepts of kind, and the correlates of likeness and unlikeness are involved. We may define sensation as the cognition of properties as kinds in their effects, and it is a compound of judgments; and a judgment is a combination of a sense impression, a consciousness, a choice, a concept, and a comparison. ”

“ On a certain day, for example, we may see a characteristic of the personality much intensified, with no outward reason. The cause is often to be found in what is taking place at some higher level — the stimulation of that quality in the ego. ”

“ Here, then, are confessedly adopted, as bases of classification, the most manifest characters of the emotions; as discerned subjectively, and objectively. The mode of diffusion of an emotion is one of its outside aspects; the institutions it generates form another of its outside aspects; and though the peculiarities of the emotion as a state of consciousness, seem to express its intrinsic and ultimate nature, yet such peculiarities as are perceptible by simple introspection, must also be classed as superficial peculiarities. ”

“ So for the affective states the terms emotion, passion, sensibility, etc., are nothing but abstractions, and in order to verify these terms and give them a real significance, we must have experiences in the region of feeling, concrete data. People who speak of a state of feeling which they have never experienced, which they know only by hearsay, have an empty concept. States of feeling are a material susceptible of all degrees of abstraction, like sensory material. ”

“ Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present. ”

“ The voluntary fixing our mind upon, or choosing an idea, image, or subject, is spontaneous attention, but when the idea for some reason impresses itself upon us then we have enforced, or reflex attention. ”

“ What is [42] necessary is something less troublesome but more important: such domination, or absorption, of the external self by the spirit of the story as will subdue it to the story-teller’s use. This will help to induce the right feeling response. Feeling, as everyone knows, is “catching.” ”

“ Where animation is denied the whole environment, wisdom begins to distinguish between spirit-haunted matter and the purely material; knowledge of person and knowledge of things differentiate, and science, the impersonal and more potent449 knowledge of the environment, properly begins. Familiarity leads to control, control to contempt, and for the unreflective mind, personality is not, as for the sophisticated, an attribute of the contemptible. ”

“ Strong will and keen perception overpower old manners, and create new; and the thought of the present moment has a greater value than all the past. In persons of character, we do not remark manners, because of their instantaneousness. ”

“ The feeling of unsatisfied desire, accompanying successive cases of association, constitutes the feeling to which we give the name of effort of recollection. And the Idea of the End, perpetually calling up the idea of the absence of what is wanted, as the means to that end, and hence calling up in close association every circumstance connected with that unknown something, constitutes the feeling which we call casting about, for the unknown Idea. ”

“ We can call, for instance, into peculiar activity, the judgment, the memory, or the imagination, and note the differences in our mental condition as the one faculty or the other is more active. And this is an experiment. Over our mental sensations we have less power. We cannot at will feel angry, or envious, or frightened. ”

“ It is something we form when, taking a number of comparatively like experience—sensible or sensational experiences in this case—we fasten our attention on their points of resemblance, leave out of account their differences, and make the resemblances stand out as a quasi-whole by themselves ”

“ Recent psychology teaches that, odd as it at first appears, our more or less definite images, auditive as well as visual, and whether actually perceived or merely remembered, are in reality the intermittent part of the mind's contents, coming and going and weaving themselves on to a constant woof of our own activities and feelings. ”

“ It is this dilemma that is the cause of the pitiful relation of modern psychology to all fundamental questions. The wild and repeated efforts to derive the will from psychological factors, from perception and feeling, are in themselves evidence that it cannot be taken as an empirical factor. ”

“ Each one sees what he expects to see, what appeals to his interests the most intensely. What the unprejudiced observer recognizes as the flimsily disguised form of the medium, the believer transforms into the object of his thoughts and longings. Only let the form be vague enough, the light dim enough, the emotions upon a sufficient strain, and that part of perception in which the external image is deficient will be readily supplied by the subjective tendencies of each individual. ”

“ Since the function of reason is thus restricted, and its competency to supply an end for, or principle of, action is denied, we must seek this end either in the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany both sensory and motor presentations,—perceptions, that is to say, and actions,—or in the more complex, or apparently more complex, emotions of the mind. ”

“ I refer to those complexes known as the sentiments. By this term, as we have seen, is understood the organization of an acquired disposition—the idea of an object—or complex of such dispositions (the psychic whole of idea plus its “meaning” derived from the setting of associated experiences) with one or more innate emotional dispositions. It must not be overlooked for one moment that a sentiment is something more than the organization of an emotion or other affect with an idea. There is nothing novel or fruitful in such a limited conception of the structure of a sentiment as this. ”

“ The extended only is real. And the facts of what is called subjective sensation, under which we may include dream and delusion of all kinds, may be adduced in support. They go to show that, as we can have the sensation without the object, and the object without the sensation, the one cannot possibly be a quality of the other. ”

“ Her whole being is sensitized, ready at a moment’s notice to respond. In our study of the mental side we saw that she can and does think, is capable of the heights and depths of emotion, and is able in a limited way to make comparisons and reach sane conclusions. ”

“ I observe a series of visual impressions, and at the same time a series of auditory impressions; if there is a certain agreement between them, I irresistibly unite these two series by my act of attention into one series, and refer them to a common cause. And so in the other cases. Attention seems to defeat, in part, its own object. Bringing something into the field of knowledge seems to be a modifying, if not a transforming, process. ”

“ Such a sentiment, possibly legitimate within certain limits, gradually initiates us in the habit of finding pleasure in melancholy; and in weak or morbid characters the habit gradually strengthens, and leads to the waste of life and the production of much vapid sentimentalism. ”

“ But all these essential characteristics, which together form for us the genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted with what we call the subjective sensations it may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations like the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the rest. ”

“ Something happens that we can only describe as a shift of the vividness of our mental processes. A moment ago, my psychological ideas were vivid, set (as it were) in the focus of attention, while all other ideas and perceptions [92] were dim and marginal; now the incoming ideas—my friend’s business or the subject of the message—drive to the front; they in their turn become vivid and focal, while the psychological ideas, just lately central and dominant, fall back, along with the perception of my sensory surroundings, into the dim background. ”