If consciousness is nothing but the subject of awareness for the
individual objects, we see at once certain consequences which are too
often forgotten in the popular, haphazard psychology. In the scientific
system of psychology, consciousness has for instance nothing whatever to
perform, that is, consciousness itself is in no way active. The active
personality of real life has been left behind and has itself been
transformed into that self which is merely content of consciousness. The
person who acts and performs the deeds of our life is then only a
central content of our consciousness which is crystallized about the
idea of our organism. It has thus become one of the contents of which
consciousness itself is passively aware. Consciousness is an inactive
spectator for the procession of the contents. Thus consciousness itself
cannot change anything in the content nor can it connect the contents.
No other function is left to consciousness but merely that of awareness.
Every change and every fusion and every process must be explained
through the relations of the various contents to one another.
Consciousness has, therefore, not the power to prefer the one idea or to
reject the other, to reenforce the one sensation and to inhibit the
other. From a psychological point of view, we have seen before that
even attention does not mean an activity of consciousness but a change
in the content of consciousness. Certain sensations become more
impressive, more clear, and more vivid, and others fade away, become
indistinct and disappear, but all that goes on in the content of
consciousness and the spectator, consciousness itself, simply becomes
aware of those changes. Consciousness has also in itself no special
span, ideas appear or disappear not because consciousness expands or
narrows itself but because the causal conditions awaken or suppress the
various contents.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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