Thought-form

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That, at least, is the natural view of our consciousness, just in so far as, in judging, we conceive our thought as essentially other than its external object, and as destined merely to correspond thereto. Now we have by this time come to feel how hard it is to define the Reality to which our ideas are thus to conform, and about which our judgments are said to be made, so long as we thus sunder external and internal meanings. ”

“ The object of the sensuous instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is named Life in the widest acceptation; a conception that expresses all material existence and all that is immediately present in the senses. The object of the formal instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is called shape or form, as well in an exact as in an inexact acceptation; a conception that embraces all formal qualities of things and all relations of the same to the thinking powers. ”

“ Our preference, however, for the objects of sense, for the pen, and the sun, as typical instances of objects of ideas, arises from the fact that in case of just these objects, it is especially easy, by observing, from without, the acts of the person who has these ideas, to form confident and, for common-sense purposes, relatively exact notions of the selection to which the internal meaning of the ideas has bound the maker of any given judgment about objects. ”

“ The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas' of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit of simply using our sensible impressions as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. ”

“ But there is implied in the conception of such a theory such a location of the process of thought in the process of reality as will222 give it an import both in the meaning of things and in the individual's thinking. We have the beginning of such a doctrine in the conception of a functional value of consciousness in the conduct of living forms, and the development of reflective thought out of such a consciousness which puts it within the act and gives it the function of preparation where adjustment is necessary. ”

“ And thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought. ”

“ But to understand the manifold combinations of which the elements of character are susceptible, and how these are determined by the breeding of race or family under various conditions, and again by the circumstances of each man's life, demands an extraordinary union of sympathetic imagination with scientific habits of thought. ”

“ Concede intellectual power, or the spiritual element, then add this temperament, and there follows a certain subtile, penetrative, radical quality of thought, a characteristic percipience of principles. And principles are not only seen, but felt; they thrill the nerve as well as greet the eye ”

“ But if the universal character of the hypothesis and the tested theory belong to the instrumental character of thought in so reconstructing a world that has proved to be imperfect, and inadequate to conduct, the stuff of the world and of the new hypothesis are the same. ”

“ Under this conception, the oppositions of thought which play so important a part in philosophy,—Being and Thought, Mind and Nature, Soul and Body, Freedom and Law, Natural Inclination and Moral Effort, Mechanism and Teleology,—are reconciled. ”

“ The necessary and allowed consequence of this hypothesis, is, that no material thing, nor any quality of material things, can be conceived by us or made an object of thought, until its image is conveyed to the mind by means of the senses. ”

“ By the side of the intellectual element, by which we estimate our thoughts and actions, there is feeling; that is, the sensibility which modifies the judgment and enlightens the deep thought determining our responsibility. ”

“ Such glaringly artificial views can only come from fantastic metaphysics or from the ambiguity of the word 'idea,' which, standing sometimes for mental state and sometimes for thing known, leads men to ascribe to the thing, not only the unity which belongs to the mental state, but even the simplicity which is thought to reside in the Soul. ”

“ I assent to the veracity of sense, and I believe that the very perception or sensible image is the external object, and on no account whatever will I consent 'to disclaim this principle.' Your philosophy—your more rational opinions— representation—your reasonings which, you say, necessitate me to depart from my primary instincts—all these I give, without reservation, to the winds. ”

“ All this active construction from sense-impressions expresses certain fundamental interests that our human spirit takes in reality. We want to have a world of a particular character; and so, from sense-impressions, we are constantly trying to build up such a world. We are prejudiced in favor of regularity, necessity, and simplicity in the world; and so we continually manipulate the data of sense for the sake of building up a notion of a regular, necessary, and simple universe. ”

“ Now, if we will annex a meaning to our words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort. ”

“ All that philosophers meant was—that we had perceptions of objects, and that these perceptions were not the objects themselves. Yet even this, the least exceptionable form of the theory that can be maintained, was found sufficient to subvert the foundations of all human certainty. ”

“ It appears then to be an undeniable fact, that from thought or sensation, all mankind, constantly and invariably, from the first dawning of reflection, do infer a power or faculty of thinking, and a permanent being or mind to which that faculty belongs ”

“ Which ideas the simple ones may be does not, however, now concern us. It is enough that certain philosophers have thought they could see under the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind elementary facts of any sort that remained unchanged amid the flow. ”

“ We have given the history of the different forms which they successively assume, and we have shown, that in all these changes they remain the same, and of the same authority, whether they enter spontaneously and involuntarily into exercise, and apply themselves to particular and determinate objects, or reflection turns them back upon themselves in order to interrogate them in regard to their nature, or abstraction makes them appear under the form in which their universality and their necessity are manifest. ”

“ Thought is the force underlying all. And what do we mean by this? Simply this: Your every act—every conscious act—is preceded by a thought. Your dominating thoughts determine your dominating actions. The acts repeated crystallize themselves into the habit. The aggregate of your habits is your character. Whatever, then, you would have your acts, you must look well to the character of the thought you entertain. Whatever act you would not do,—habit you would not acquire,—you must look well to it that you do not entertain the type of thought that will give birth to this act, this habit. ”

“ No doubt it seemed to simplify the problem to suppose that the functioning of the intellect could be studied as a thing apart, and unrelated to the general context of the vital functions. Again, it was to simplify to assume that thought could be considered apart from the personality of the human thinker. ”

“ THE Phenomena of Thought have long appeared to be divisible into two great classes; which were distinguished by the names, the one of the Intellectual, the other of the Active, Powers of the Human Mind. In the phenomena which compose the first of those classes, and which we have now pretty completely surveyed, the sensations and ideas are considered merely as existing. ”

“ By thus first distinguishing sharply between the conscious internal meaning of an idea and its apparently external meaning, we get before us an important way of stating the problem of knowledge or, in other words, the problem of the whole relation between Idea and Being. ”

“ Place a man of intelligence and cultivation in the hypnotic state, and give him a premise, say in the form of a statement of a general principle of philosophy, and no matter what may have been his opinions in his normal condition, he will unhesitatingly, in obedience to the power of suggestion, assume the correctness of the proposition ”

“ It has its roots deep down in the diverse habits of thought of different orders of minds. And the conflicting conceptions of nature and life which these diverse habits of thought severally generate, influence for good or ill the tone of feeling and the daily conduct. ”

“ On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. ”

“ All that remains for us, in that impossibility which nature has imposed on us of attaining a more intimate knowledge of the essence and constitution either of mind or of matter, is to attend to the phenomena which they present, analysing whatever is complex, and tracing the order of every sequence. ”

“ And ‘is,’ considered as a substantive verb, as in the example ‘This man is,’ contains in itself the application of the copula of judgment to the most elementary of all abstractions—‘thing’ or ‘something.’ Yet if a being has the power of thinking—‘thing,’ it has the power of transcending space and time by dividing or decomposing the phenomenally one. ”

“ Whatever comes forth from the rational soul in the way of generality, of that the rational soul gives an account by means of images in the way of particularity, and brings it home to common sense by way of allegories. ”

“ At bottom the process is one of conception, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse. ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions 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. ”

“ Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. ”

“ Can we see, then, any way in which a unit of pure experience might enter into and figure in two diverse streams of consciousness without turning itself into the two units which, on our hypothesis, it must not be? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again, in the multiplied reflex action of the mind upon itself and its own judgments and conceptions, there may be some imperfections in the analysis or critical examination of the component parts of the idea, in the synthesis or construction of these component parts into an ideal formula, and in the language by which verbal expression is given to the conceptions of the mind. What is to be aimed at is, to obtain intellectual conceptions which are clear and adequate to the idea, and a verbal expression which is also clear and adequate to the mental conception. ”

“ But when we speak of a man's habitual condition, we mean his constant and absolute completeness of mind or body, in some particular point—as for instance, his perception of virtue, or of some art, or else some science or other. ”