Mental world

“ Since the laws of the mental world are uniform, we can count on them as aids toward understanding other people and understanding ourselves.
"Intelligent Scrutiny versus Morbid Introspection." It helps wonderfully to be able to look at ourselves in an objective, impersonal way. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ They have overcome the outer world and the social world entirely, they unfold our inner life, our mental play, with its feelings and emotions, its memories and fancies, in a material which seems exempt from the laws of the world of substance and material, tones which are fluttering and fleeting like our own mental states. ”

“ This, no occasional or hypothetical action of the mind, is inextricably bound in with that primitive mental state where man recognizes in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will. ”

“ Training the Mind.—There never was a time in the history of the world when so many people were striving after definite knowledge,—some scheme of mentality, [Pg 361] some mental atmosphere,—some spiritual or idealistic phenomena,—which would satisfy the craving, the hunger of the restless and dissatisfied human mind for absolute enlightenment regarding the mysteries of life. ”

“ The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of causality, color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leave me thought, will, sentiment, all that is internally present to my consciousness, to find myself; I ask no more. Give me communication with other beings, which affect me or are affected by me, which transmit to me thoughts and wills, which cause me pleasure or pain; I need nothing more in order to have a world which I can very well conceive. I am ignorant of the quality of the things, not of their possibility: the soul changes its state, not its nature. ”

“ The distinction is not a purely sentimental one—not a belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world—the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical world—the world of feeling, consciousness, thought, and moral life. ”

“ We have seen how our empirical self-consciousness gets formed; namely, as what we have called a social contrast-effect, which arises within the circle of our actual and empirical consciousness. We are primarily conscious of the self as a very varying, unstable, and ill-defined mass of contents — thoughts, wishes, interests, memories, desires, sensations — which we find different from, and opposed to, or contrasted with, a largely ideal world of contents which we conceive as the minds, wishes, interests, etc., of others, namely, our fellows in society. ”

“ In contemplating the relations between body, soul, and spirit, between Universal Mind and individual mind, the methodised study of which constitutes Mental Science, we must never forget that these relations indicate, not the separateness, but the unity of these principles. We must learn not to attribute one part of our action to one part of our being, and another to another. ”

“ I still defend, and, in the fourth lecture of this volume I expound afresh, the thesis that the contrast between our “descriptive” knowledge of the physical world and our “appreciative” knowledge of the facts of finite life, is determined precisely by this difference between our social consciousness of what is “valid for all individuals” and our personal consciousness of what is valid for the Self. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Little by little, A and B became less in evidence, until at length they were heard from no more, and C—the normal self—was left dominant, with a complete restoration to physical as well as mental health.
But, the reader may well ask, what does all this mean? Can there really be more than one self, one personality, in human beings? If so, [289] what are we? What is the true nature of man? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their turn of thought, their habits of mind, their conversation, their influence, insensibly extending over the whole surface of society and frequently penetrating its intimate structure, have, more than all other things put together, tended to raise us up into an ideal world, lift us from the dust in which we are too prone to grovel, and develop in us those germs of imagination which even the most sluggish and apathetic understandings in some degree possess. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leaving out of view the Will, which is a simple homogeneous mental state, forming the link between feeling and action, and not admitting of subdivisions; our states of consciousness fall into two great classes—Cognitions and Feelings. ”

“ Glancing now at the main position we have arrived at, and from which our inquiry will proceed, we have found that circumstances, conditions, and relations, whether determined with a reference to the external world or the subjective consciousness, only create the situation by virtue of the temperament or passion which experiences them and derives its nutriment through them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You will see that the mental power you most wish to train and augment is distinguishable enough even in the commonest affairs of life. Take a case of feeling. Some object—no matter what—kindles an emotion within you—anger, wish affection, pursuit, dislike, avoidance—and you feel strongly impelled to take action thereupon. ”

“ Psychology, we call to our aid. But civilized man has but recently began to study the underlying strata of his intellectual and spiritual make-up. We are still lisping in the hornbook of psychology. Why then put on dionysian airs and bamboozle ourselves and the world with introspective profundities? ”

“ My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience. ”

“ The higher feelings of pure morality and refined emotion, and the power of abstract reasoning and ideal conception, are useless to them; are rarely, if ever, manifested; and have no important relations to their habits, wants, desires, and well-being. They possess a mental organ beyond their needs. ”

“ Without this cunning contrivance of our busy brains, with their tireless curiosity and their unpractical wonderings, what could even sound instinct and the enduring heart have done to create the world of the civilized man? ”

“ This view, as I hold, is indeed sound in laying stress upon a deep connection between our observation of the significant inner life of our own will, and our assurance that the universe in which we live has true Being. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the development of this soul-vision, judgment and mental penetration will be incalculably increased, and there will evolve within you that prophetic vision by the aid of which you will be able to sense coming events, and to forecast, with remarkable accuracy, the result of your efforts.
And in just the measure that you alter from within will your outlook upon life alter; and as you alter your mental attitude towards others they will alter in their attitude and conduct toward you. ”

“ In fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our inner world ”

“ This negative character of the universal judgments holds true of them, as we have said, just in so far as you sunder the external and the internal meanings, and just in so far as you view the Real as the Beyond, and as merely the Beyond. If you turn your attention once more to the realm of the ideas viewed as internal meanings, you see, indeed, that they are constantly becoming enriched, in their inner life, by all this process. ”

“ Experience will teach us to detect the warning movement of the inner Guide. A deepseated sense of dissatisfaction, an indescribable feeling that somehow everything is not right, are the indications to which we do well to pay heed; for we are "guarded ones," and these interior monitions are the working of that innermost principle of our own being which is the immediate outflowing of the Great Universal Life into individuality. ”

“ I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind. ”

“ In fact, our mental life is nothing but a readjustment, of complex reactions. The poet finds recourse in his phantasies; the philosopher gives vent to his theoretical speculations; [348] the scientist resorts to his inventions and hypothetical theories; the well balanced, normal individual seeks readjustment in healthy activities,—art, literature, science, occupations, sport, etc., etc. ”

“ It is because they are in their proper and almost inextricable entanglement with our individual or temperamental functions, absolutely essential elements of all our rationality, of all our mental developments, of all our worth as thinkers, as workers or as producers ”

“ 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 ”

“ But, regarding matter as a human, mortal concept, entirely mental, and wholly subject to the impress and influence of mind, and knowing, as we do now, that mental concepts change with changed thought, we are forced to look with more favor upon these questions which for centuries caused men to shed their fellows’ blood. ”

“ To many minds, however, the temptation to magnify this interest into a significant portion of one's mental life, to invest it with a serious power to shape belief and to guide conduct, is unusually strong, in some cases almost irresistible. ”

“ We let them pass by and still live on in the world until, in some unlooked-for moment, and some unhoped-for way, the true solution, and the answer to these cavils which call in question the reality both of man’s inner life and his personal experience, spontaneously suggest themselves. ”

“ This inhabitant, this mobile spirit, can spread and merge in the general consciousness, and gather itself again to one intense point of personality. It has too an innate knowledge of--an instinct for--another, greater rhythm, another order of Reality, as yet outside its conscious field; or as we say, a capacity for the Infinite. This capacity, this unfulfilled craving, which the cunning mind of the practical man suppresses and disguises as best it can, is the source of all your unrest. ”

“ But the material world, in the sense in which alone we are entitled to speak of it, is still only a name for a multitude of external causes of our feelings,—of causes which are, recognized by us as permanent and uniform in their nature ”

“ It follows that when, for general purposes, we study, not the psychology, but, as at present, the total significance of our conscious life, we are much less interested in the separation between knowledge and will than in that unity which psychology already recognizes, and which philosophy finds of still more organic importance. ”