Cobwebs of Thought eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 59 pages of information about Cobwebs of Thought.

Cobwebs of Thought eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 59 pages of information about Cobwebs of Thought.
article Mr. Mck Cattell considers it proved that “experimental methods can be applied to the study of mind, and that the positive results are significant,” and he hopes, “one day, we shall have as accurate and complete a knowledge of mind as we have of the physical world.”  Beyond this knowledge of mind as a machine, the Psychologist goeth not.  He ends, and what do we know more as to what mind is?  Philosophy properly so-called, begins here or ought to begin.  In science we experiment widely and constantly with mind and arrive at some knowledge of its workings and capacities; we learn occupation with the mind itself as a subject for observation, and we practise a self-analysis, which adds to the sum of general knowledge.  Through this study we know more about our senses and their faculties, more of our own tendencies and idiosyncrasies, and in what direction they tend.  We are on the way to solve some such problems as:  “the influences of early impressions, the ingredients of character, the varying susceptibility to mental anguish, the conquest of the will,” and many another.  These are beginnings—­there is much more to attain to, if we would know mind even scientifically, for we have only attacked its breast works, but we are on the right road, as we believe, towards this most interesting of all sciences—­Mind Science.  From Philosophy we do not as yet know definitely that mind is, or what it is, or why it is.  The psychologist accepts the word mind, but it is not accepted as a philosophical term; it is called Consciousness, Being, Ego, and anything else but mind.  Notwithstanding, we all feel what we mean by the word.  Though the senses divide the non-ego, the world outside us, into five separate parcels, things seen, things heard, things smelt, things touched, things tasted, there is a faculty of unifying, a sensation of unity in us, which makes us conscious of all these separate sensations as forming a whole in any object which comes into our consciousness.  Kant has given this unifying faculty, or sensation, a long name, which does not make it any clearer.  What is this inner power, which unifies sensations and how does it come?  In some way the mind supplies it to its mental states or consciousness.  And within us this unifying faculty, which we call Mind, is felt through the infinite number of modifications of sensations or mental states, for we are aware that what we call a mind exists in us.  It is this consciousness of unity in complexity, which makes memory and identity possible.  The exploded idea of mental substance and its attributes, held by the School men, was probably suggested to them by the consciousness of this mental unity.  In our mentality there is something which makes each one say “My mind,” not “My minds.”  Now it is this unity of sensations, which is lost, and the mind with it, if the ego is divided as Professor W. James divides it into many egos such as—­the inner self—­the complex self—­the social self—­the
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Cobwebs of Thought from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.