Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic AttitudeDewey, John
Philosophy
Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude
Dewey, John
Philosophy; Pragmatism
envisaged in the primitive demand, it would still imply the tragedy of
the world not made for us and the "problem of evil," in which the life
of the spirit is persistently a salvage of one of two always
incompatible goods, a saving by surrender.
And this is all that a mind is--an affair of saving and rejecting, of
valuing with a system of objects of which a living body and its desires
and operations, its interests, are focal and the objects marginal, for
its standard. Mind, thus, is neither simple, nor immutable, nor stable;
it is a thing to be "changed," "confused," "cleared," "made-up,"
"trained." One body, I have written elsewhere,[89] "in the course of its
lifetime, has many minds, only partially united. Men are all too often
"of two minds." The unity of a mind depends on its consistent pursuit of
_one_ interest, although we then call it narrow; or on the cooeperation
and harmony of its many interests. Frequently, two or more minds may
struggle for the possession of the same body; that is, the body may be
divided by two elaborately systematized tendencies to act. The beginning
of such division occurs wherever there is a difficulty in deciding
between alternative modes of behavior; the end is to be observed in
those cases of dual or multiple personality in which the body has
ordered a great collection of objects and systematized so large a
collection of interests in such typically distinct ways as to have set
up for itself different and opposed "minds." On the other hand, two or
fifty or a million bodies may be "of the same mind."
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