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psychology, we go beyond the sensation to the “thing” which it
represents. When you hear a donkey bray, you not only hear a
noise, but realize that it comes from a donkey. When you see a
table, you not only see a coloured surface, but realize that it
is hard. The addition of these elements that go beyond crude
sensation is said to constitute perception. We shall have more to
say about this at a later stage. For the moment, I am merely
concerned to note that perception of objects is one of the most
obvious examples of what is called “consciousness.” We are
“conscious” of anything that we perceive.
We may take next the way of MEMORY. If I set to work to recall
what I did this morning, that is a form of consciousness
different from perception, since it is concerned with the past.
There are various problems as to how we can be conscious now of
what no longer exists. These will be dealt with incidentally when
we come to the analysis of memory.
From memory it is an easy step to what are called “ideas”—not in
the Platonic sense, but in that of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, in
which they are opposed to “impressions.” You may be conscious of
a friend either by seeing him or by “thinking” of him; and by
“thought” you can be conscious of objects which cannot be seen,
such as the human race, or physiology. “Thought” in the narrower
sense is that form of consciousness which consists in “ideas” as
opposed to impressions or mere memories.
We may end our preliminary catalogue with BELIEF, by which I mean
that way of being conscious which may be either true or false. We
say that a man is “conscious of looking a fool,” by which we mean
that he believes he looks a fool, and is not mistaken in this
belief. This is a different form of consciousness from any of the
earlier ones. It is the form which gives “knowledge” in the
strict sense, and also error. It is, at least apparently, more
complex than our previous forms of consciousness; though we shall
find that they are not so separable from it as they might appear
to be.
Besides ways of being conscious there are other things that would
ordinarily be called “mental,” such as desire and pleasure and
pain. These raise problems of their own, which we shall reach in
Lecture III. But the hardest problems are those that arise
concerning ways of being “conscious.” These ways, taken together,
are called the “cognitive” elements in mind, and it is these that
will occupy us most during the following lectures.
There is one element which SEEMS obviously in common among the
different ways of being conscious, and that is, that they are all
directed to OBJECTS. We are conscious “of” something. The
consciousness, it seems, is one thing, and that of which we are
conscious is another thing. Unless we are to acquiesce in the
view that we can never be conscious of anything outside our own
minds, we must say that the object of consciousness need not be
mental, though the consciousness must be. (I am speaking within
the circle of conventional doctrines, not expressing my own
beliefs.) This direction towards an object is commonly regarded
as typical of every form of cognition, and sometimes of mental
life altogether. We may distinguish two different tendencies in
traditional psychology. There are those who take mental phenomena
naively, just as they would physical phenomena. This school of
psychologists tends not to emphasize the object. On the other
hand, there are those whose primary interest is in the apparent
fact that we have KNOWLEDGE, that there is a world surrounding us
of which we are aware. These men are interested in the mind
because of its relation to the world, because knowledge, if it is
a fact, is a very mysterious one. Their interest in psychology is
naturally centred in the relation of consciousness to its object,
a problem which, properly, belongs rather to theory of knowledge.
We may take as one of the best and most typical representatives
of this school the Austrian psychologist Brentano, whose
“Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint,”* though published in
1874, is still influential and was the starting-point of a great
deal of interesting work. He says (p. 115):
* “Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte,” vol. i, 1874. (The
second volume was never published.)
“Every psychical phenomenon is characterized by what the
scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (also the
mental) inexistence of an object, and what we, although with not
quite unambiguous expressions, would call relation to a content,
direction towards an object (which is not here to be understood
as a reality), or immanent objectivity. Each contains something
in itself as an object, though not each in the same way. In
presentation something is presented, in judgment something is
acknowledged or rejected, in love something is loved, in hatred
hated, in desire desired, and so on.
“This intentional inexistence is exclusively peculiar to
psychical phenomena. No physical phenomenon shows anything
similar. And so we can define psychical phenomena by saying that
they are phenomena which intentionally contain an object in
themselves.”
The view here expressed, that relation to an object is an
ultimate irreducible characteristic of mental phenomena, is one
which I shall be concerned to combat. Like Brentano, I am
interested in psychology, not so much for its own sake, as for
the light that it may throw on the problem of knowledge. Until
very lately I believed, as he did, that mental phenomena have
essential reference to objects, except possibly in the case of
pleasure and pain. Now I no longer believe this, even in the case
of knowledge. I shall try to make my reasons for this rejection
clear as we proceed. It must be evident at first glance that the
analysis of knowledge is rendered more difficult by the
rejection; but the apparent simplicity of Brentano’s view of
knowledge will be found, if I am not mistaken, incapable of
maintaining itself either against an analytic scrutiny or against
a host of facts in psychoanalysis and animal psychology. I do
not wish to minimize the problems. I will merely observe, in
mitigation of our prospective labours, that thinking, however it
is to be analysed, is in itself a delightful occupation, and that
there is no enemy to thinking so deadly as a false simplicity.
Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a
joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least,
there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored.
The view expressed by Brentano has been held very generally, and
developed by many writers. Among these we may take as an example
his Austrian successor Meinong.* According to him there are three
elements involved in the thought of an object. These three he
calls the act, the content and the object. The act is the same in
any two cases of the same kind of consciousness; for instance, if
I think of Smith or think of Brown, the act of thinking, in
itself, is exactly similar on both occasions. But the content of
my thought, the particular event that is happening in my mind, is
different when I think of Smith and when I think of Brown. The
content, Meinong argues, must not be confounded with the object,
since the content must exist in my mind at the moment when I have
the thought, whereas the object need not do so. The object may be
something past or future; it may be physical, not mental; it may
be something abstract, like equality for example; it may be
something imaginary, like a golden mountain; or it may even be
something self-contradictory, like a round square. But in all
these cases, so he contends, the content exists when the thought
exists, and is what distinguishes it, as an occurrence, from
other thoughts.
* See, e.g. his article: “Ueber Gegenstande hoherer Ordnung und
deren Verhaltniss zur inneren Wahrnehmung,” “Zeitschrift fur
Psychologie and Physiologie der Sinnesorgane,” vol. xxi, pp.
182-272 (1899), especially pp. 185-8.
To make this theory concrete, let us suppose that you are
thinking of St. Paul’s. Then, according to Meinong, we have to
distinguish three elements which are necessarily combined in
constituting the one thought. First, there is the act of
thinking, which would be just the same whatever you were thinking
about. Then there is what makes the character of the thought as
contrasted with other thoughts; this is the content. And finally
there is St. Paul’s, which is the object of your thought. There
must be a difference between the content of a thought and what it
is about, since the thought is here and now, whereas what it is
about may not be; hence it is clear that the thought is not
identical with St. Paul’s. This seems to show that we must
distinguish between content and object. But if Meinong is right,
there can be no thought without an object: the connection of the
two is essential. The object might exist without the thought, but
not the thought without the object: the three elements of act,
content and object are all required to constitute the one single
occurrence called “thinking of St. Paul’s.”
The above analysis of a thought, though I believe it to be
mistaken, is very useful as affording a schema in terms of which
other theories can be stated. In the remainder of the present
lecture I shall state in outline the view which I advocate, and
show how various other views out of which mine has grown result
from modifications of the threefold analysis into act, content
and object.
The first criticism I have to make is that the ACT seems
unnecessary and fictitious. The occurrence of the content of a
thought constitutes the occurrence of the thought. Empirically, I
cannot discover anything corresponding to the supposed act; and
theoretically I cannot see that it is indispensable. We say: “I
think so-and-so,” and this word “I” suggests that thinking is the
act of a person. Meinong’s “act” is the ghost of the subject, or
what once was the full-blooded soul. It is supposed that thoughts
cannot just come and go, but need a person to think them. Now, of
course it is true that thoughts can be collected into bundles, so
that one bundle is my thoughts, another is your thoughts, and a
third is the thoughts of Mr. Jones. But I think the person is not
an ingredient in the single thought: he is rather constituted by
relations of the thoughts to each other and to the body. This is
a large question, which need not, in its entirety, concern us at
present. All that I am concerned with for the moment is that the
grammatical forms “I think,” “you think,” and “Mr. Jones thinks,”
are misleading if regarded as indicating an analysis of a single
thought. It would be better to say “it thinks in me,” like “it
rains here”; or better still, “there is a thought in me.” This is
simply on the ground that what Meinong calls the act in thinking
is not empirically discoverable, or logically deducible from what
we can observe.
The next point of criticism concerns the relation of content and
object. The reference of thoughts to objects is not, I believe,
the simple direct essential thing that Brentano and Meinong
represent it as being. It seems to me to be derivative, and to
consist largely in BELIEFS: beliefs that what constitutes the
thought is connected with various other elements which together
make up the object. You have, say, an image of St. Paul’s, or
merely the word “St. Paul’s” in your head. You believe, however
vaguely and dimly, that this is connected
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