The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
are instances of what I mean. Every one gets these feelings many times
an hour; but few readers, probably, are conscious of exactly what
sensations are meant by the names I have just used. All these facts,
and an enormous number more, seem to prove conclusively that, in
addition to the fully conscious way in which an idea may exist in the
mind, there is also an unconscious way; that it is unquestionably the
same identical idea which exists in these two ways; and that therefore
any arguments against the mind-stuff theory, based on the notion
that _esse_ in our mental life is _sentiri_, and that an idea must
consciously be felt as what it is, fall to the ground.
_Objection._ These reasonings are one tissue of confusion. Two states
of mind which refer to the same external reality, or two states of
mind the later one of which refers to the earlier, are described
as the same state of mind, or 'idea,' published as it were in two
editions; and then whatever qualities of the second edition are found
openly lacking in the first are explained as having really been there,
only in an 'unconscious' way. It would be difficult to believe that
intelligent men could be guilty of so patent a fallacy, were not the
history of psychology there to give the proof. The psychological
stock-in-trade of some authors is the belief that two thoughts about
one thing are virtually the same thought, and that this same thought
may in subsequent reflections become more and more _conscious_ of what
it really _was_ all along from the first. But once make the distinction
between simply _having an idea_ at the moment of its presence and
subsequently knowing all sorts of things _about it_; make moreover that
between a state of mind itself, taken as a subjective fact, on the one
hand, and the objective thing it knows, on the other, and one has no
difficulty in escaping from the labyrinth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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