Sapience

“ Thence come the two constituent elements of every consciousness, the distinction between object and subject, the ego and the non-ego, thought and the object of thought. We call objective every idea or quality that it is possible to refer to the object alone, independently of the action or disposition of the subject. We call subjective all knowledge implying identity of subject and object, all discipline bearing on the rules of the spontaneous activity of the ego, since without that activity the rules which should direct it would not exist. ”

“ For him, and such as him,—for us, too, if we read wisely,—the toiling slaves of science, often working with little consciousness of the full proportions of the edifice they are helping to construct, have spent their busy lives. All knowledge asserts its true dignity when once brought into relation with the grand end of knowledge,—a wider and deeper view of the significance of conscious and unconscious created being, and the character of its Creator. ”

“ Our systems of science, our conclusions in philosophy, our intuitions into first truths and laws, and all the confidence with which we accept truth in all these great realms of mental life, rest back on the observations, reasonings and conclusions for whose reality and order consciousness is our most fundamental voucher. To its tests and verifications all the processes of knowing must submit. No truth is even visible except in the light in which consciousness holds all our acts and forms of intelligence. ”

“ Whether we trace mental progression through the grades of the animal kingdom, through the grades of mankind, or through the stages of individual growth; it is obvious that the advance, alike in cognitions and feelings, is, and must be, from the presentative to the more and more remotely representative. It is undeniable that intelligence ascends from those simple perceptions in which consciousness is occupied in localizing and classifying sensations, to perceptions more and more compound, to simple reasoning, to reasoning more and more complex and abstract—more and more remote from sensation. ”

“ The importance we accord the physiological accompaniments of mental process is partly accounted for by the significance which attaches to more recent knowledge as constituting scientific progress; in the effort to bring together in our [Pg 358] conception the two elements of consciousness and brain-action, to whose association we are not accustomed by immediate perception, we are led to lay especial weight upon the facts of recent discovery, which are connected with so great advance in science and have done away with so many superstitions. ”

“ The metaphysician, fully admitting the distinction we have been insisting on, may say, "but this discrimination is itself a mere analysis of mind. The 'state' of which the being is conscious is mind; and the fact of consciousness, with the being to whom it belongs, is also mind. ”

“ And if the outer world is the vast dictionary and grammar of thought we speak of, then it is also an organ throughout of intelligence. Whose intelligence? By this question we are set directly confronting God, the universal Author; no more to hunt for him by curious arguments and subtle deductions, if haply we may find Him; but He stands expressed everywhere, so that, turn whichsoever way we please, we behold the outlooking of His intelligence. ”

“ The doctrine had been continually gaining ground, either per incuriam, or by design, that the senses were to some extent intellectual, were capable of cognition, or were competent to place intelligible data before the mind. But if sense can act as intellect, what is the use of intellect—why any intellect at all? If sense can intelligently apprehend anything, why can it not intelligently apprehend everything? Let man diligently cultivate his senses, and his advances in knowledge shall be immense. ”

“ On the other hand, a traditional doctrine, which has won for itself no small hearing in psychology, regards the volitional, or active, side of our consciousness, not merely as a fact in itself, but as a cause of other facts, both physical and mental. From this point of view, the distinction between intellect and will acquires a fresh importance, and declines to be reduced to that mere distinction of aspects which we have emphasized in the foregoing account. ”

“ If I am asked for the proof of such an existence, I answer that the proof is consciousness, as I define it, and this I conceive is the highest kind of proof.
One may appeal to the convictions of mankind for an answer to the question, What is the highest and most satisfactory kind of knowledge that any of us possess? The most intelligent man may be mistaken in that part of self-knowledge that relates to his own character or motives. ”

“ Now, to render in any degree complete that characteristic of the human mind which it has been our object or endeavor in the previous Lectures to sketch in detail, we were obliged to take in also those higher elements which by many are called in question, and by some positively denied to exist. And herein lay the natural ground and the occasion for our introducing the mention of them, at least as facts of consciousness generally acknowledged by the common-sense of mankind. ”

“ When I, a pioneer in one department of this beautiful science, discover the truths of Revelation and the truths of science reflecting light the one upon the other, how can I, as a truth-loving, knowledge-seeking man, fail to point out the beauty and rejoice in its discovery? ”

“ Science, knowledge, leads to fact consciousness; religion, experience, leads to value consciousness; philosophy, wisdom, leads to co-ordinate consciousness; revelation (the substitute for morontia mota) leads to the consciousness of true reality; while the co-ordination of the consciousness of fact, value, and true reality constitutes awareness of personality reality, maximum of being, together with the belief in the possibility of the survival of that very personality. ”

“ Psychology on the one hand, theology on the other, may offer us diagrams and theories of this proceeding: of the strange oscillations of the developing consciousness, the fitful visitations of a lucidity and creative power over which the self has little or no control, the raptures and griefs of a vision by turns granted and withdrawn. But the secret of genius still eludes us, as the secret of life eludes the biologist. ”

“ O let us be graciously endowed by Thee with knowledge, understanding, and discernment. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, gracious Giver of Knowledge.' The intellect was to be turned to the service of the God from whom intelligence emanated. ”

“ For the habit and aptitude of knowledge, and the knowledge already [Pg 471] acquired, will remain in the separated soul, so far as relates to the knowledge which is in the intellect, and no longer in the lower perceptive faculties. Neither will distance from the object affect the soul’s knowledge, since it will know through the influx of forms (species) from the divine light.
“Yet through the cognition belonging to their nature, separated souls do not know what is doing here below. ”

“ This knowledge of God, which in its first manifestations as the spirit of historical humanity, had not been fully conceived, but only perceived through unanalyzed sense impressions and intuitive experience, and which heretofore had appeared only as wisdom and light, must henceforth, on the basis of the already acquired wisdom and light, progress and become an exact science, which draws its knowledge not only from internal and external experience, but also examines it critically. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Suppose, farther, that, as the conversation proceeded, and higher and more sacred topics were gradually broached, and inquiry pressed upon the borders of the world unseen, he should discover an equal familiarity with that as with the natural world, even to the minute details of its phenomena and laws—that the heaven and the hells, angels and devils, and everything of this class with which the human mind intensely yearns to be acquainted, were evidently within the compass of his amazing intelligence. ”

“ And when I saw that, I said to myself—I will train myself, by Natural Science, to the truly rational, and therefore truly able and useful, habit of mind; and more, I will, for it is my duty as an Englishman, train every Englishman over whom I can get influence in the same scientific habit of mind, that I may, if possible, make him, too, a rational and an able man. ”

“ The nous, intellect or spirit, pertains to the higher or intuitional part of the mind; the dianoia or understanding to the reasoning faculty, and the doxa, or opinion-forming power, to the faculty of investigation.—Plotinus, accepting this theory of mind, says: “Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, and illumination. ”

“ How knowledge becomes possible for any intelligence, is in fact the problem how are we to think, under one of its aspects, the relation between individual consciousness and the wider sphere of reality? ”

“ These wonderful discoveries which we owe to that mighty little instrument, the telescope of the inner firmament with all its included worlds; these simple formulae by which we condense the observations of a generation in a single axiom; these logical analyses by which we fence out the ignorance we cannot reclaim, and fix the limits of our knowledge,—all lead us up to the inspiration of the Almighty, which gives understanding to the world's great teachers. ”

“ The intellect and intelligence of man are manifested through the organs of the brain, and from these, consciousness, will memory, judgment, thought, volition, and passion, the functions of the mind, do proceed. ”

“ It was so in my training. We seek to silence all opinions, all half-truths, all thinking, in fact, in order to Know. We postulate, of course, a center of Spontaneous Knowledge, or Genius, above the mind. ”

“ As regards philosophy in its proper and genuine sense, we find put forward without any hesitation, as an entirely sufficient equivalent for the long course of mental discipline—for that profound and fruitful process through which the human spirit attains to knowledge—the direct revelation of the divine and the healthy common sense of mankind, unconcerned with and undisciplined by any other knowledge or by proper philosophical reflection. ”

“ I would be glad to know your lordship’s opinion, whether, when my brain has lost its original structure, and when some hundred years after, the same materials are again fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being—whether, I say, that being will be me; or if two or three such beings should be formed out of my brain, whether they will all be me, and consequently be all one and the same intelligent being. ”

“ In the first case we are conscious of a distinction and even of a radical opposition between the object and the subject of knowledge; in the second, we are conscious of their fundamental identity in this sense, that the thinking and willing subject presents itself to itself as an object of thought and study. ”

“ He points out how readily, owing to the ambiguous term “consciousness,” “we confound experience with knowledge”; but holds that experience is the wider term. “Knowledge must fall within experience, and experience extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not left to infer my own being from my knowing.... Objective reality is immediately ‘given,’ or immediately ‘there,’ not inferred.” But the subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately there. ”

“ I should rejoin—But they had, pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the scientific instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye and quick ear; the hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for the human body, and mind, and spirit; for human nature in a word, in its completeness, as the highest fact upon this earth. ”

“ It is not the optic nerve alone that gives the knowledge of surrounding objects to the mind, but it is that which God has placed in man—a system of intelligence that attracts knowledge, as light cleaves to light, intelligence to intelligence, and truth to truth. ”

“ Thus we trace the whole of Perception or Knowledge to this power of comparison and noting likenesses, and this we see to be coincident with the organization of consciousness into central meeting-places or ganglia, in which different sensations are presented to a common tribunal and so compared together. We see, therefore, that Perception does not originate consciousness; it only organizes and develops it. ”

“ And as with memory, so with other of our mental powers, we may, I think, distinguish between a higher and a lower faculty of each; between our higher, self-conscious, reflective mental acts—the acts of our intellectual faculty—and those of our merely sensitive power. This distinction I believe to be one of the most fundamental of all the distinctions of biology, and to be one the apprehension of which is a necessary preliminary to a successful investigation of animal psychology. ”