The Theory of Knowledge
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: states of consciousness in which we have been supposed to apprehend present reality, we have to inquire into their character as mental states, and their value as elements of knowledge. On the words mental state we must briefly repeat the caution given in the introductory chapter. The true mental state of the adult man is complex to the point of indefiniteness. We do not find apprehension succeeded by judgment, judgment by feeling, feeling by an act of will, and so on. If we did, our problem would be immensely simplified. But, in fact, every one of these terms represents an abstraction from the normal state of consciousness. Take what seems a purely intellectual state ?a process of reasoning such as that by which we follow a geometrical demonstration. The actual consciousness of the reasoner is more or less absorbed in this subject, as the case may be. If he is an unwilling schoolboy, his wandering attention mingles ideas of escape and recreation with his geometrical constructions and syllogisms; and even the half of his attention which is devoted to the argument is coloured and qualified by the sense of effort with which he follows it. If he is a budding mathematician, his whole soul is concentrated on the work before him; but in this very concentration there is an effort and an interest involved which bring elements from the emotional and volitional side of his nature into play. Pure thought, pure will, pure feeling are not names of concrete mental states. This or that state may approximate more or less closely to the one type or the other; but how far this approximation may go, and whether it ever reaches completeness, it would be hard to say. The question is one for psychologists. All that we have to remark is, that when, for the purposes of our logical analysis, we spea...