The Physics and Philosophy of the Senses: Or, The Mental and the Physical in Their Mutual Relation

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H. S. King & Company, 1875 - Mind and body - 562 pages

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Page 386 - Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.
Page 67 - Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain ; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, " How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness? " The chasm between...
Page 400 - ... mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own...
Page 400 - For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.
Page 45 - In itself it is of little moment whether we express the phenomena of matter in terms of spirit ; or the phenomena of spirit, in terms of matter ; matter may be regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of matter — each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred.
Page 66 - A man, for example, can say, I feel, I think, I love; but how does consciousness infuse itself into the problem ? The human brain is said to be the organ of. thought and feeling; when we are hurt the brain feels it, when we ponder...
Page 386 - I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room : for methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without : would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.
Page 66 - Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one phenomenon to the other.
Page 44 - For, after all, what do we know of this terrible " matter," except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness ? And what do we know of that
Page 400 - The table I write on I say exists, that is I see and feel it, and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.

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