Classical literature; Knowledge, Theory of -- Early works to 1800
c. When in imagination we enter into the closet of the mind and withdraw
ourselves from the external world, we seem to find there more or less
distinct processes which may be described by the words, 'I perceive,' 'I
feel,' 'I think,' 'I want,' 'I wish,' 'I like,' 'I dislike,' 'I fear,'
'I know,' 'I remember,' 'I imagine,' 'I dream,' 'I act,' 'I endeavour,'
'I hope.' These processes would seem to have the same notions attached
to them in the minds of all educated persons. They are distinguished
from one another in thought, but they intermingle. It is possible to
reflect upon them or to become conscious of them in a greater or less
degree, or with a greater or less continuity or attention, and thus
arise the intermittent phenomena of consciousness or self-consciousness.
The use of all of them is possible to us at all times; and therefore
in any operation of the mind the whole are latent. But we are able to
characterise them sufficiently by that part of the complex action which
is the most prominent. We have no difficulty in distinguishing an act
of sight or an act of will from an act of thought, although thought is
present in both of them. Hence the conception of different faculties or
different virtues is precarious, because each of them is passing into
the other, and they are all one in the mind itself; they appear and
reappear, and may all be regarded as the ever-varying phases or aspects
or differences of the same mind or person.
d. Nearest the sense in the scale of the intellectual faculties
is memory, which is a mode rather than a faculty of the mind, and
accompanies all mental operations. There are two principal kinds of it,
recollection and recognition,--recollection in which forgotten things
are recalled or return to the mind, recognition in which the mind finds
itself again among things once familiar. The simplest way in which we
can represent the former to ourselves is by shutting our eyes and trying
to recall in what we term the mind's eye the picture of the
surrounding scene, or by laying down the book which we are reading and
recapitulating what we can remember of it. But many times more powerful
than recollection is recognition, perhaps because it is more assisted by
association. We have known and forgotten, and after a long interval the
thing which we have seen once is seen again by us, but with a different
feeling, and comes back to us, not as new knowledge, but as a thing to
which we ourselves impart a notion already present to us; in Plato's
words, we set the stamp upon the wax. Every one is aware of the
difference between the first and second sight of a place, between a
scene clothed with associations or bare and divested of them. We say to
ourselves on revisiting a spot after a long interval: How many things
have happened since I last saw this! There is probably no impression
ever received by us of which we can venture to say that the vestiges are
altogether lost, or that we might not, under some circumstances, recover
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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