Mental image

“ Perception is pent up and becomes, helped by emotion, conscious representation. Now it is, psychologists tell us, just in this interval, this space between perception and reaction, this momentary halt, that all our mental life, our images, our ideas, our consciousness, and assuredly our religion and our art, is built up. ”

“ Let us first try to understand what we know concerning ourselves. The longer one lives and the more one studies the mystery of "Being," the more one is forced to the conclusion that in every Human Being there are two Personalities, call them what you like—"the Real and its Image," "the Spiritual and its Material Shadow," or "the Transcendental and its Physical Ego." ”

“ It was in vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion which an idea, when vividly conceived, excites in us, is not an illusion but a fact, as real as any of the other qualities of objects; and far from implying anything erroneous and delusive in our mental apprehension of the object, is quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual laws and relations. ”

“ And all the solutions which have hitherto been propounded as answers to the problem, may be generalised into these two: either consciousness is able to transcend, or go beyond itself; or else the whole pomp, and pageantry, and magnificence, which we miscall the external universe, are nothing but our mental phantasmagoria, nothing but states of our poor, finite, subjective selves. ”

“ Thus the ideas of mind and matter, of subject and object, of the Ego and external world are really evolved from the aggregation of our mental state which are the only realities so far as we are concerned. ”

“ This theory of the knowledge of what self once was conscious of, in the modes or qualities of self, contrasted with the more direct sort of knowledge of consciousness, suggests a variety of questions, and, among others, an inquiry into the laws according to which those objects of the mind that are at first observed, in a direct experience of the inner and outer world, become, as objects of memory and imagination, converted into mental modes, and pass into the current of our associated thoughts. ”

“ The incidents of every human life, which both make and mar, are drawn to it by the quality and power of its own inner thought-life. Every soul is a complex combination of gathered experiences and thoughts, and the body is but an improvised vehicle for its manifestation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What do we think of when we think of a person? Is not the nucleus of the thought an image of the sort just mentioned, some ghost of characteristic expression? It may be a vague memory of lines around the mouth and eyes, or of other lines indicating pose, carriage, or gesture; or it may be an echo of some tone or inflection of the voice. ”

“ And such comparison is continually bringing to light the fact that there is a continuity in our mental structure, that our highest thoughts and emotions lead us back to our common sense-impressions, and that consequently, in spite of all individual differences of temperament and mental organization, our inner experience is in all its larger features a common experience. ”

“ In proceeding to examine and compare the mental phenomena, the first circumstance that strikes us, prior to any attempt to arrange them in classes, is, that the mind which exhibits these is susceptible of a variety of feelings, every new feeling being a change of its state; and, indeed, it is by such changes alone that it manifests itself, either in our own consciousness, or in the actions of our fellow men. ”

“ By way of being as intelligible as possible we might tacitly assign symbolic reference to mental activity, and thereby avoid some detailed explanation. It is a matter of pure convention as to which of our experiential activities we term mental and which physical. Personally I prefer to restrict mentality to those experiential activities which include concepts in addition to percepts. But much of our perception is due to the enhanced subtlety arising from a concurrent conceptual analysis. ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotion to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ Every one’s mental life may fairly be said to be divided between those ideas, thoughts, and feelings which he receives from and gives out to his social world, the social environment in which he lives, and those which belong more properly to his inner life and the innermost sanctuary of his personality and character. ”

“ When we speak of the 'mental' condition of a person, we refer to his senses, his perceptions, his consciousness, his ideas. If his mental condition is perfect, his will, his memory, his understanding are perfect, and connected with a healthy bodily organization. ”

“ What he has thought and what he has done become objective: thought-forms, having been consciously visualized and allowed to take root and grow and blossom and produce, now pass in a solemn and mighty panorama, as the consciousness-content of his personality. ”

“ And I may mean all mankind, with perhaps a very sharp image of one man in my mind's eye. The meaning is a function of the more 'transitive' parts of consciousness, the 'fringe' of relations which we feel surrounding the image, be the latter sharp or dim. ”

“ But when we ask what reality Nature possesses, we must beware of letting our social interests, and the general motives that lead us to conceive the World of Description, blind us to the true principles upon which an interpretation of experience should be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation, — we have seen from what motives in our own lives all such contrasts result. ”

“ Those perceptions which enter with the most force and violence we may name impressions, and under this name include all our sensations, passions, and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas, I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning." "The identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one." ”

“ Soul, mind, spirit, these old and simple words are the strongest, the profoundest, the surest; age cannot antiquate them, nor science undo them; they last with the rocks, and still go beyond. But, having in view rather the operation than the cause, we find a use also in such alternative phrases as “mode of thinking,” “mode of feeling and thinking,” “habit of thought,” “moral and intellectual character or constitution,” and the like. ”

“ While we think we are imagining a character we may, so marvellous are the hidden ways, be really interpreting a being actually existing, brought into psychic contact with us by some affinity of sentiment or soul. ”

“ It is needless that the thought or the personality, holding the transferred picture, should be individually and consciously present. Though bodies are leagues apart, and the circumstances forgotten, they float in the general atmosphere of human mind. ”

“ Intellectually, we conceive or we judge; our past feelings, in Simple Suggestion, of image after image, arise again, in colours more or less faint, without any known cause exterior to the mind. By our capacity of the other species of Suggestion, we are impressed with feelings of a different order, that arise when two or more objects are contemplated together,—feelings of their agreement, proportion, or some one or other of the variety of their relations. ”

“ It is obvious that the world is not the same for all of us; but that it is for each one of us simply the world of his individual perceptions.
As Many Worlds as Minds
The whole subject of sense-impressions, [Pg 53] sensation and perception may, therefore, be looked at from the standpoint of the mind as an active influence, as well as from the standpoint of outside objects as the exciting causes of sense-impressions. ”

“ We feel that they indicate to us some power unknown.
``No doubt it is difficult to apportion what belongs to the spirit, the soul, and what belongs to the brain. We can only let ourselves be guided in our judgment and our appreciations by the same feeling that is created in us by the discussion of phenomena. ”

“ When once, by the bold synthesis of reason and sensation with those other attributes of the complex vision which we name instinct, imagination, intuition, and the like, the soul itself comes to be regarded as the substratum of personal existence, that desolating separation between humanity and Nature ceases to baffle us. ”

“ The commonest objection which the doctrine there laid down runs up against is drawn from the existence of our ‘affections.’ In our pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance or preciousness of certain objects and situations, we have, I am told by many critics, a great realm of experience intuitively recognized as spiritual, made, and felt to be made, of consciousness exclusively, and different in nature from the space-filling kind of being which is enjoyed by physical objects. ”

“ If we regard the human subject, in the ordinary psychological way, as a being whose conscious life runs parallel with the highest physical processes of his organism, we get a view of the relation between the intellect and the will which is far more just, at once to the natural history of the mind, and to the deeper meaning of the inner life of our consciousness. View man as a natural being, and you find him adjusting himself to his environment, acting, as they say, in response to stimuli. ”

“ But when such observation is ended or at fault, and the man retreats, as it were, into his inner self, then in the quiet all the senses merge and harmonize into a single perfect instrument of perception. ”

“ For the object of consciousness is characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this stability and immutability. What we think is that and no other, whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous change.
But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, in his body. ”

“ The mind thus acquires, by exercise, a habit, as it were, of perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate sphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant. Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation of its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. ”

“ We are told that our visions of the unpicturable, the ideal world, which our imagination paints and which our logical reasoning calls for as the necessary cap or final corollary to any finite world which our intelligence can actually define,— that such visions are nothing but the pictures of infantile desires projected on to a great screen and made to mock us with the appearance of reality. ”

“ A Mind at the Mercy of Associations.--We will consider, then, the nature and the functions of attention. The mind--with the possible exception of the state of coma--is never idle; ideas are for ever passing through the brain, by day and by night, sleeping or walking, mad or sane. We take a great deal too much upon ourselves when we suppose that we are the authors and intenders of the thoughts we think. ”

“ Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—what you like—it must know. ”

“ Practically, does all this help one much? It is possible that some who have passed for the deepest observers of human nature, owed their renown more to an acute observation of the phenomena of feeling, an intuitive knowledge of what people like and dislike, a retentive memory, and a happy knack of making all these available at the right moment, than to any profound reasoning on abstract principles. ”

“ Essentially this—FEELING KNOWN—that is, affections of the heart and imagination become understood subject-matter to the self-conscious intelligence. Must feeling perish because intelligence sounds its depths? ”

“ As is observed by the author of the Analysis, the exposition in detail of the associations which enter into our various feelings of the sublime and beautiful, would require the examination of the subject on a scale not suited to the character nor proportioned to the dimensions of this Treatise. Of all our feelings, our acquired pleasures and pains, especially our pleasures, are the most complex; resulting from the whole of our nature and of our past lives, and involving, consequently, a greater multitude and variety of associations than almost any other phenomena of the mind. ”

“ By the Sensation, we mean the whole state of consciousness, under an actual or present impression of sense, as in looking at the moon, in listening to music, in tasting wine. By the Idea is meant the state of mind that remains after the sensible agent is withdrawn, or that may be afterwards recovered by the force of recollection. ”