The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
are often employed as analogies, but in such cases, we must bear in mind
that we are dealing with mere analogies.
In addition to the impropriety of using the term atoms in psychology, it
appears to me erroneous to attribute feeling or anything like feeling
to physical processes of any description. Natural processes are so
constituted, that under certain conditions, such as take place in animal
organisms, they will develop feelings. Clifford speaks in this sense of
the elements of feeling. Lloyd Morgan calls it metakinesis, and I find
that feelings being simply states of awareness represent the subjectivity
of natural processes. We have reasons to suppose that in the processes
of unorganised nature this subjectivity is neither feeling nor anything
like feeling: but the subjectivity of the natural processes is as it were
the stuff out of which our own feelings are formed.
I accept all the arguments of Professor Mach that our ideas are
artificial products; and I am also anxious to distinguish in our ideas
between that which describes facts and that which has been added to the
description of facts in shape of theories or conjectures.
The sense-pictures of objects and ideas also are not things but images
and symbols of things created for the purpose of representing things;
they are as Prof. Lloyd Morgan says, “constructs.” But these constructs
are not mere fancy, they are not air-castles. They are constructed in
order to imitate certain realities. Now, in building these constructs
as an imitation or a copy of reality, we are often at a loss how to
build them. There is for instance in the objective reality observed, a
something somewhere high in the air, the basis of which is invisible,
and being limited in our means of acquiring information we are ignorant
of the real state of things. So in reconstructing or imitating the
facts, we build scaffolds to support it, and we are too apt to forget
that these scaffolds do not represent objective facts but are artifices
to make certain facts, which we know in parts only, thinkable, i. e.
representable without breaks in mental constructs.
XI. TRUTH IN MYTHOLOGY.
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