Mind over matter

“ Such is the nature even of our most baneful impressions that instances do arise where good may come from so corrupt a source. The connection between material and immaterial, between mind and matter, so operates, that sometimes, and in proportion to the strength of the impression, a change is wrought by the mere control of the mind over the bodily functions. ”

“ Absorbed in material selfhood we discern and reflect but faintly the substance of Life or Mind. The denial of material selfhood aids the discernment of man's spiritual and eternal individuality, and destroys the erroneous knowledge gained from matter or through what are termed the material senses. ”

“ Mind and matter brought down to the essential, to the consciousness and its object, form a natural whole, and the difficulty does not consist in uniting but in separating them. ”

“ The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. ”

“ Or do you want what's inside me—my mind—my brain—my mind—"
He faltered to a stop, shocked by truth. He put a hand to his brow. "My mind. That's it. You want it, don't you?"
"You don't care for the husk that cradles the mind, but you want the intellect. You covet my thought, my life power, my ego. The psychic force, the power of thought and existence—you want all those because that is what you are, aren't you?" ”

“ Conclusions about the world had subtly assembled in the back of his brain in the course of his life, conclusions repudiated at other times for the need to think positively and to make the world his home for lack of a choice of another, slipped through barriers of his mind to the forefront of his brain. ”

“ Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. ”

“ It is in the testing of, grappling with, and ultimately destroying, these illusions that he develops still higher powers, those of discrimination, spiritual perception, steadfastness of purpose, and calmness of mind, by the exercise of which he is enabled to unerringly distinguish the true from the false, both in the world of thought and that of material appearances. ”

“ But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising. First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory. If the absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than as it knows us? But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else. ”

“ They know that by gross living the sense of conscience may be dulled, or that by right living it may be strengthened. In like manner the subjective mind perceives by its own senses certain invisible types of evil seeking external manifestations in the microcosm. ”

“ It appears to us that our point is now in a fair way of being completely made out. We think that, as far as mere reasoning can do it, we have succeeded in extricating the fact of consciousness from the oppressive and obscuring envelopment of "the human mind." ”

“ By day and by night, at all times and every where, he is the victim of an energetic and comprehensive system of measures, which blot out his senses, paralyze his mind, degrade and brutify his nature, and suppress the instinctive workings of truth, generosity, and manhood in his breast. ”

“ In order, therefore, to escape the latter of these alternatives, we will do our best to embrace and comply with the former of them. Such being our reasons, we now nail our colours to the mast, and prepare ourselves for a good deal of polemical discussion on the subject of "the human mind." ”

“ We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. ”

“ So long as our theory strikes on the mind as strange and alien, so long do we say we have not found truth; we feel the impulse to go beyond and beyond, we alter and alter our views, till we see them as a consistent whole. ”

“ But if they proceeded further, and entered on negations, if they surmised that that immanent aspect of the universe in which they lived and moved and had their being was the sole and only aspect, if they surmised that there was no personality, no feeling, no locomotion, no mind, no purpose, apart from them and their kind, they would greatly err. What conception could they ever form of the manifold interests and activities of man? Still less of the universe known to man, of which he himself forms so trivial a portion. ”

“ From this continual reaction of your mind on your heart, from this insatiable need of occupying your thoughts, is born the fatal habit of self-examination, that entices you to such horrid study of your own conduct, and the spirit of analysis that leads you to the discovery of such unworthy motives in others. ”

“ But then do we not know that our thoughts are formed, and our beliefs modelled, not on the outward signs or intrinsic evidences of things,—as would be the case were we always rational,—but by the inner workings of the mind itself? At the present turn of my life I can believe in nothing that is gracious. ”

“ This argument is founded on the purely internal phenomena, and, therefore, is valid even against the idealists, against those who take from the external world all reality, and reduce it to mere appearances, to simple phenomena of our mind. ”

“ But we must recollect that this is not by the force of personal will upon the substance, which is an error that will land us in all sorts of inversion, but by realizing our mind as a channel through which the Universal Mind operates upon substances in a particular way, according to the mode of thought which we are seeking to embody. ”

“ 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. ”

“ O, deluded heart!—ever bartering away substance for shadow!"
I grow philosophic sometimes. Thought will, now and then, take up a passing incident, and extract the moral. But how little the wiser are we for moralizing! we look into the mirror of truth, and see ourselves—then turn away, and forget what manner of men we are. ”

“ But the brain-action, or, if you so phrase it, the mind, is not confined to the reasoning faculties; nor can we afford to ignore the sentiments, the affections which are, perhaps, the most potent realities of life. ”

“ Such words must sound as dreams to those analytical philosophers who allow nothing in man below the sphere of consciousness, actual or possible; who have dissected the human mind till they find in it no personal will, no indestructible and spiritual self, but a character which is only the net result of innumerable states of consciousness; who hold that man’s outward actions, and also his inmost instincts, are all the result either of calculations about profit and loss, pleasure and pain, or of emotions, whether hereditary or acquired. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the force of his mind seems to have been so bent on exploding innate ideas, and tracing our thoughts to their external source, that he either forgot, or had not leisure to examine what the internal principle of all thought is. ”

“ Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.
There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood ”

“ If, instead of doing every thing carelessly, and letting all things around us fall into confusion, we compel ourselves to act with order and neatness, an orderly principle of the mind comes into activity, in an orderly form of ultimate life, and the disorderly principle, finding no form in the ultimate life for its activity, lies dormant on the circumference of the mind, and, unless there be a relapse into disorderly action, will lie there forever dormant. ”

“ The now unclogged mind grasps with vigor any subject presented to it, the spirits are exuberant and the physical frame buoyant. But, is the trouble cured, is it permanently eradicated from the system? ”

“ Now who that is acquainted with these instances can doubt that this motion of the mind is altogether in opinion and voluntary? for who can doubt that disorders of the mind, such as covetousness and a desire of glory, arise from a great estimation of those things by which the mind is disordered? from whence we may understand that every perturbation of the mind is founded in opinion. ”

“ The mind trained to the recognition of the obvious and established, accustomed to fit its own standards to any and all forms of the human animal, coming up with a dizzying impact against the mind that had no guide, no standard, no code, but floats in the flux of its own emotions. ”

“ But if, as often happens, things are brought before his mind singly, or piecemeal, and in fragments, then the natural disposition to see correctly is perverted to the opposite, and the healthy mind is perplexed. ”

“ We all use it to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them “nothing but” expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations [pg 013] of the living truth ”

“ Thus, if the objective mind is given too free a rein, and is permitted to deluge the subjective mind with unhealthful, unhappy, and unsuccessful thoughts, it is inevitable that the latter will at last succumb to the attacks upon it, and disasters of some sort follow. ”

“ The dilemma to which the philosophers of mind are reduced is this: unless they attribute consciousness to mind, they leave out of view the most important and characteristic phenomenon of man: and if they attribute consciousness to mind, they annihilate the object of their research, in so far as the whole extent of this fact is concerned. ”

“ And thus the anti-miracle argument, instead of leading, as all true philosophy ought, to an exact correspondence between the realities of things and the convictions received by the mind regarding them, palpably forms a bar to the reception of beliefs, adequate to the possibilities of actual occurrence or event, and so constitutes an imperfection or flaw in the mental economy, instead of working an improvement. ”

“ What then is the precise effect of our argument against the prevailing doctrine of the "human mind"? If the word "mind" be used merely to express the general group or assemblage of passions, emotions, intellectual states, and other modifications of being, which both man and the animal creation are subject to, we have no objections whatever to the use of the term. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But this consideration forces us still further, and we feel compelled to ask ourselves, whether, with our minds constituted as they are, we can believe in, or understand any thing wholly immaterial? Whether we can imagine the existence, for, example, of "force" without matter?—a shape which is formless?—a form visible to the eye, yet wholly immaterial? ”

“ 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? ”

“ But many suppose that we have so many temporalities to influence us, and so many causes, perplexities, and anxieties of this world to contend against, that we do not have power to concentrate our minds as we could wish. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And this second objection is of a most serious nature. "Mind can only be caused by Mind," and, therefore, Mind must either be uncaused, or caused by a Mind. What is our warrant for ranking this assertion? Where is the proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind? ”

“ 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. ”