The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
other words and to speak exactly, it is not to know it at all. To feel
pain, for example, is to feel ourselves unhappy without well knowing
either what we are or what is this modality of our being which makes us
unhappy.... Impose silence on your senses, your imagination, and your
passions, and you will hear the pure voice of inner truth, the clear
and evident replies of our common master. Never confound the evidence
which results from the comparison of ideas with the liveliness of the
sensations which touch and thrill you. The livelier our sensations and
feelings (_sentiments_) are, the more darkness do they shed. The more
terrible or agreeable are our phantoms, and the more body and reality
they appear to have, the more dangerous are they and fit to lead us
astray." (Entretiens sur la Métaphysique, 3me Entretien, _ad init._)
Malebranche's Théodore prudently does not try to explain how God's
'infinite felicity' is compatible with his not feeling joy.
[11] Green: Prolegomena, §§ 20, 28.
[12] Introd. to Hume, §§ 146, 188. It is hard to tell just what this
apostolic human being but strenuously feeble writer means by relation.
Sometimes it seems to stand for system of related fact. The ubiquity
of the 'psychologist's fallacy' (see Vol. I p. 196) in his pages, his
incessant leaning on the confusion between the thing known, the thought
that knows it, and the farther things known about that thing and about
that thought by later and additional thoughts, make it impossible to
clear up his meaning. Compare, however, with the utterances in the
text such others as these: "The waking of Self-consciousness from the
sleep of sense is an absolute new beginning, and nothing can come
within the 'crystal sphere' of intelligence except as it is determined
by intelligence. What sense is to sense is nothing for thought. What
sense is to thought, it is as determined _by_ thought. There can,
therefore, be no 'reality' in sensation to which the world of thought
can be referred." (Edward Caird's Philosophy of Kant, 1st ed. pp.
393-4.) "When," says Green again, "feeling a pain or pleasure of heat,
I perceive it to be connected with the action of approaching the fire,
am I not perceiving a relation _of which one constituent, at any rate,
is a simple sensation? The true answer is, No._" "Perception, in its
simplest form...--perception as the first sight or touch of an object
in which nothing but what is seen or touched is recognized--_neither
is nor contains sensation_" (Contemp. Rev., xxxi. pp. 746, 750.) "Mere
sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality." "Mere
feeling, then, as a matter unformed by thought, has no place in the
world of facts, in the cosmos of possible experience." (Prolegomena to
Ethics, §§ 46, 50.)--I have expressed myself a little more fully on
this subject in Mind, x. 27 ff.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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