Recognizance

“ Recognition is an awareness of sameness. But to call recognition an awareness of sameness implies an intellectual act of comparison accompanied with judgment. I use recognition for the non-intellectual relation of sense-awareness which connects the mind with a factor of nature without passage. ”

“ The Image of God was not seated in the features of your face but in the lineaments of your soul. In the knowledge of your powers, inclinations, and principles, the knowledge of yourself chiefly consisteth. ”

“ Recognition, then, being between persons, it may happen that one person only is recognized by the other—when the latter is already known—or it may be necessary that the recognition should be on both sides. ”

“ In all these cases, recognition involves a lively reaction of my mind upon external impressions. Recognition is not found apart from attention, though attention may exist more or less completely without recognition. ”

“ I have had experience, of a constant series of antecedents and consequents, in the life of man; generation, birth, childhood, and so on; as I have had of pain from putting my finger in the flame. A corresponding association is formed. If the sight of a stranger calls up the idea of his origin and progress to manhood, the ordinary train of antecedents and consequents is called up; nor is it possible for me to prevent it. The association is indissoluble, and is one of the cases classed under the name of Belief. ”

“ The known, that is to say, what we are accustomed to, so that we no longer marvel at it, the commonplace, any kind of rule to which we are habituated, all and everything in which we know ourselves to be at home:—what? is our need of knowing not just this need of the known? the will to discover in everything strange, unusual, or questionable, something which no longer disquiets us? ”

“ Often we succeed in forming a complete association with the past, we localize the given familiar experience, and then complete recognition ensues. Familiarity is incomplete, vague, indefinite recognition. ”

“ Thoughts are nearer, more akin to our personality than actions are, for they are primary expressions from personality, always preceding conscious speech and action. Of all the indices to our personality of which we have knowledge thoughts are the clearest; we are as our thoughts are. In compliance with that grand mandate, “Know Thyself,” why scan life’s page of speech and actions—shadows—when a vast volume of thoughts—realities—expressions of our personality, lies open to us for finding knowledge of self? ”

“ The recognition by {18} psychology of respect for personality as one of the three or four most fundamental conditions—if not the most essential of all—of happiness, of character, and of influence, is explicit confirmation of the truth of this element of the social consciousness. ”

“ We feel them to be our fellow men, our kinsmen, with whom we constitute that person of whose existence I am aware every time I say We: the person we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, the one subject, the true subject of human knowledge and of human activity. The subject which knows and acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or rather in behalf of the one man in whom all single individuals are united and with whom they are all identified. ”

“ Recognition completes what attention begins. The attentive man wants to know, the recognizing man knows, or thinks that he knows. Recognition implies accompanying attention. Attention without recognition implies wonder, curiosity, perplexity, perhaps terror. But what is the law of this process of recognition? Does the process affect the impressions themselves that are the basis of the recognition? The answer is: Very distinctly, recognition does affect the impressions. The activity involved in recognition alters the data of sense, and that in almost every case. ”

“ It seems reasonable to me—upon the hypothesis that it is a person using another's mind or brain—that there must be more or less of that other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to the unseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, the fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. ”

“ We do not recognise the type; but as those who do have acknowledged the accuracy of the representation, we read, learn, and enjoy making acquaintance with an individuality and surroundings foreign to our own experience. ”

“ Now it is this selective character of every rational conscious process, a character as manifest to consciousness as it is ultimately significant for the constitution of all Being, — it is this character, I say, which to my mind is responsible above all for the Individuality which we have already characterized as belonging to the whole of Being, and which we shall now find as equally characistic of every region of finite Being. ”

“ This conviction, or impression if you will, has become stronger with years and with the knowledge of life; years have imparted, and time has but confirmed me in, the notion that any skill I possess lies in the detection of character, and the unravelment of that tangled skein which makes up human motives. ”

“ The World of Description, as a conceived objective order, is the result of our attempting, through a process of serial discrimination, to make good the second of these aspects of our ignorance. The World of Appreciation we learn to recognize by coming to a better definition of what it is that our will even now seeks. ”

“ The common sense, imperfect recognition of our neighbor implies rather realization of the external aspect of his being, as that part of him which affects us, than realization of his inner and peculiar world of personal experience. ”

“ We look on all that in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others; and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge. It is in the differences that it actually consists. ”

“ In these circumstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a material object, separated from every essential relationship with us—with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. ”

“ Such a centre of consciousness, unlike all else, we rightly call a person, a self or ego; and because of its importance we often fix attention on it, withdrawing notice for the moment from the relations which encompass it. Such an abstraction, if clearly understood, is entirely legitimate. I shall frequently make use of it under the title of the separate or abstract self. But it should be borne in mind that it is an abstraction10 and that the real person is what I shall call the conjunct or social self, made up of that centre of consciousness and the relations in which it stands. ”

“ The Tribal Self.—In the metaphysical sense, the word ‘self’ is taken to mean the conscious subject, das Ich, the whole stream of feelings which make up a consciousness regarded as bound together by association and memory. But, in the more common and more restricted ethical sense, what we call self is a selected aggregate of feelings and of objects related to them which hangs together as a conception by virtue of long and repeated association. ”

“ Well, I don't want to obstruct business, of course, but suppose, for instance, I get myself identified by a man I know and a man you know, and a man who can leave his business and come here for the delirious joy of identifying me, and you admit that I am the man I claim to be, corresponding as to description, age, sex, etc., with the man I advertise myself to be, how would it be about your ability to identify yourself as the man you claim to be? ”

“ The reproduced state in its recognition recognizes the object as presented to sense-experience, recognizes, or is aware at least, that it has had some such recognitions on previous occasions, and at the same time recognizes, or is aware of its present recognition. ”

“ In all these instances, where there are no circumstances that constitute a character, and familiarize to us the person spoken of, we naturally enquire who he is, and for want of farther information become indifferent as to what is recorded of him. ”

“ Being " as appearance the twisting round of values: appearance was that which conferred the values. Knowledge in itself in a world of Becoming is impossible; how can knowledge be possible at all, then? ”

“ We have seen, that in the proposition, “All men are animals,” Belief is merely the recognition that the meaning of the term, “all men,” is included in that of the term “animals,” and that the recognition is a case of association. In the proposition also, “kings are men,” the belief is merely the recognition, that the individuals named “kings,” are part of the many, of whom “men,” is the common name. ”

“ All the knowledge they possess is that based upon their own material senses. And therefore, when they apply that knowledge to subjects outside their own personality, they deal with them in terms of their own personality. ”

“ You understand what is meant by knowledge. Knowledge is pigeon-holing a new impression with old impressions—recognizing a new impression. What is meant by recognition? [Pg 59] Finding its association with the similar impressions that we already have. Nothing further is meant by knowledge. If that be the case, it must be that we have to see the whole series of similars. ”

“ An intuitive recognition of the identity of will in all the phenomena separated by individuation is the source of justice, benevolence, and love; while from a non-recognition of its identity spring egotism, malice, evil and ignorance. ”

“ When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are 'me' and 'not-me' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. ”

“ Herewith, however, we come to a point in the theory of our consciousness of likeness and difference which is, in my opinion, of critical importance for our whole doctrine about the particular facts of the world, and for our final interpretation of the problem of the individual. The likenesses and differences that we observe in facts are not merely thrust upon us without our consent or connivance. They are the objects of our attentive Interest. ”

“ Mental representation is the mean in the syllogism of the elevation of intelligence, the link between the two significations of self-relatedness—viz. being and universality, which in consciousness receive the title of object and subject. ”

“ When that stage has been reached not merely the greater part, but the whole, of our knowledge will be impressed with one character—the character, namely, of positivity or scientificalness; and all our conceptions in every part of knowledge will be thoroughly homogeneous. ”

“ Before going on to speak of the effect of our own activity upon our knowledge, when attention is combined with active recognition of impressions, we want to formulate the law that governs the action of attention upon sense-impressions apart from recognition. ”

“ In some cases recognition is possible; in other cases the change has been too great. Those who have since become Masters of the Wisdom are often instantly recognisable, even thousands of years ago, but that is for a very different reason. ”

“ Such a co-operation of assimilations and complications is seen in the most striking manner in those processes of association which in ordinary life are called "recognitions," or, if the scope of the region of association over which the recognition stretches is indefinitely larger, are called "cognitions." We recognise, for example, an acquaintance, whom we have not seen for a long time. ”

“ In other words in sense-perception and conception we have already, as in self-conscious thought, the necessary distinction between the perceiving, conceiving and thinking Ego and the object of perception, conception, and thought. ”

“ The perfect oneness of the personal self must be maintained, and the term faculty, when used for any form of psychical ability, must be understood simply as expressing the soul's capacity or power to do any specific form of work, or to act in any particular and distinctively definable way, as, for instance, to know, to feel, to will, to remember, to compare. ”

“ We now proceed to explain the nature of personal identity, which has become so great a question in philosophy, especially of late years in England where all the abstruser sciences are study'd with a peculiar ardour and application. ”

“ When two men are discussing anything it is the conception and not the varying individual presentations of it that they aim at. The conception, then, is the standard of value for the individual presentations. ”

“ Therefore whatever knowledge may be to the knower, as a social phenomenon it is something displayed in bodily movements. For the present I am deliberately postponing the question of what knowledge is to the knower, and confining myself to what it is for the external observer. ”

“ If you ask me whether a man is identical in this or that respect, and for one purpose or another purpose, then, if we do not understand one another, we are on the road to an understanding. In my opinion, even then we shall reach our end only by more or less of convention and arrangement. ”

“ Some psychologists attempt to find the origin of recognition in the feeling of familiarity. Familiarity, however, is not a primary state out of which recognition develops, but on the contrary recognition is the primary state and familiarity is derivative only. ”

“ To discuss all the ways in which one experience may function as the knower of another, would be incompatible with the limits of this essay. [30] I have just treated of type 1, the kind of knowledge called perception. [31] This is the type of case in which the mind enjoys direct ‘acquaintance’ with a present object. In the other types the mind has ‘knowledge-about’ an object not immediately there. ”