Chapter XII The Nature of Mind, or Its Powers and Faculties
We have seen, in the preceding chapters, that our only mode of gaining a knowledge of the natural attributes of God, is by the study of the nature of mind. We have seen also that the only way to discover the nature of mind is to examine what are its qualities, and how it acts and is acted upon in our own experience.
When we discover what our minds actually do, we find out what they have power to do. The faculties of mind are its powers of acting as they are exhibited in our own experience.
The following presents a brief outline of the powers and faculties of mind as they have been classified and named by the people.
Ideas is the word most frequently used to include all the operations and states of mind.
Our ideas are often referred to as divided into two classes, viz., ideas gained by the senses, and ideas that pass through the mind without the aid of the senses.
Intellectual Powers
The power to gain ideas by the five senses is called sensation or perception.
The power to have ideas without the use of the senses is called conception.
Per is the Latin word for by, and con is the word for without. So we have perceptions by the senses, and conceptions without the senses.
Imagination or fancy, is the power to make new combinations of our conceptions.
Memory is the power of recalling past ideas, and of recognizing them as having existed before.
Judgment is the power of comparing ideas, and noticing their relations to each other.
Abstraction is the power of noticing certain parts or certain qualities of things, while other parts or qualities are unnoticed.
Association is the power of recalling past ideas according to certain modes, called laws of association.
The above powers are usually classed together, and called the intellectual powers, or the intellect.
The Susceptibilities, or Feelings
The powers of feeling various kinds of pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, enjoyment and discomfort, are called the susceptibilities, the emotions and the feelings.
When any thing is found to be the cause of pleasurable feelings, there follows a desire to secure it, and it is called good. When any thing causes pain, a desire follows to avoid it, and it is called evil.
These desires to secure good and avoid evil are called motives (or movers), because they move the mind to action in order to secure the good desired or to escape the evil feared. The objects that cause such desires are also called motives.
For example, gold is called the motive that led a man to murder, and the desire of gold is also called the motive of that act.4
Desires are measured as strong or weak by our own consciousness. When we desire two incompatible things and must choose one or the other, before the act of choice we are conscious that one creates a desire which is stronger than the other.
The only mode of deciding which desire is strongest, is by our own consciousness.
The Will
The power of choosing, or willing, is called the will. It is also called the power of volition.
When several desires coexist, some of which must necessarily be denied in order to gratify others, we ordinarily choose that object which excites the strongest desire, as measured by our consciousness.
But it is often the case that we feel the strongest desire for that which is not best for us. Thus, when sick we have tempting fruit and nauseous medicine before us, with power to choose either. Our intellect decides that the medicine is best for us, but our strongest desire is for the fruit.
In such a case we have power to choose either that which excites the strongest desire or that which the intellect decides to be best, even when it does not excite the strongest desire.
This power is the chief feature of a rational mind in distinction from an irrational mind.
And the belief that we have this power is to be placed as one of the principles of common sense, because all men talk and act as if they believe they possess this power. And if any person were to talk and act as if he did not believe that he had power to choose in either of these two ways, he would be regarded as having lost his reason.
Reason, or Common Sense
Of the thoughts which continually pass through the mind, we find that some are attended with a feeling of the real existence of the objects of our thoughts, and others are not so attended. For example, we may think of a man with a certain form carrying a dagger and going to commit murder, and with this, a feeling that no such thing is really existing. Again, we may have this same idea attended with the conviction that it is a reality.
This feeling of the reality of the objects of our thoughts is called belief, or faith.
Our minds are so made, that we necessarily believe not only that things are really existing at the present time, but that things will occur that are not now in existence. For example, we believe the sun will rise to-morrow morning in another place nearer toward the north or south than it did the present morning. We believe the tide will rise higher or lower on a coming day than it did the present day. And thus multitudes of events are believed to be in the future.
Those things which really do or will exist, in distinction from those we may think of but which do not and will not exist, are called truths, or realities.
All our comfort and happiness depend on our believing the truth, meaning by truth the reality of things. To believe that things exist when they do not, or that things are not existing when they are, involves certain pain, disappointment and mistake.
Our great safeguard from this is that part of our mental organization called reason, or common sense. This, as has been shown, consists in the necessary belief of certain truths by all men.
The test by which these truths are identified and distinguished from all other knowledge, is the fact that usually all men talk and act as if they believed them, and that when they fail to do so, they are regarded as having “lost their reason.”
The truths thus necessarily believed are the foundation of the process called reasoning, which is a mode of establishing other truths by the aid of those already believed.
These principles of reason or common sense are often called by other names, such as intuitions, intuitive truths, first principles, etc.
Thus all the powers of mind are arranged in the four general classes, viz., the intellect, the susceptibilities, the will, and reason or common sense.
In regard to the power of mind called reason, what is claimed here is, not that either the common people or metaphysicians have usually thus clearly set forth what is here so described and named; but that all men, learned and unlearned, allow that there are truths which are necessarily believed by all mankind; that these are the foundation of all reasoning, and that they often are called reason. So when any one is found to lack a belief in certain of these intuitive truths, he is said to have “lost his reason.” And when any act or assertion is seen to contradict any of these truths, it is said to be “contrary to reason.”
Therefore it is proper to put the belief in these implanted truths as a distinct power of the mind, and to call it “the reason.” And as the belief of these truths is common to all men, it is also proper to call it common sense.