THE HÛMAN MÏND :
In keeping with tradition, in many great books, the word Mïnd is used less frequently than reason, intellect, understanding, or soul. There are yet many other words such as intelligence, consciousness, and even spirit or psychè, which often carry part of the connotation of the word Mïnd. Certain authors use Mïnd as a synonym for one or another of these words and give it meaning which often writers express exclusively in terms of reason or understanding. Some discuss Mïnd without reference to a soul, some identify Mïnd with a soul or spirit, and some conceive Mïnd as only a part of the spirit or soul.
My use of the word Mïnd is partly the result of its present currency, partly the result of the fact that it is somewhat more neutral than the others and therefore less prejudicial to the conflicting theories which are juxtaposed in this discussion.
Intellect or Reason are words that usually imply a sharper distinction between the faculties or functions of sensation and thought than does the word Mïnd. Imagination and Memory, for example, are attributed to Understanding in writings of Lock and Hume, whereas in the analytic vocabulary of Aristotle and Aquinas, Imagination and Memory belong to Sense, not to reason or intellect. Similarly, words like soul or spirit usually connote a substantial as well as an immaterial mode of being, whereas Mïnd can have the meaning of a faculty or a power to be found in sentient beings.
What Then Does The Universe Contain,
because there is Mïnd in it, which would be lacking if everything else could remain the same with Mïnd removed? The facts I am compelled to mention in answering this question should give some indication of the elements of meaning common to Mïnd and all of its synonyms.
First Is The Fact
(of Thought or the process) Of Thinking:
If there were no evidence of thought in the world, Mïnd would have little to no meaning. The recognition of this fact throughout history accounts for the development of diverse theories about Mïnd. None of the great writers denies the phenomenon of thought, therefore none are without some conception of Mïnd.
Further, it may be supposed that such words as thought or thinking, because of their relative ambiguity, cannot help in defining the Aura of Mïnd. Irrespective of whatever the relation of thinking to sensing, however, thinking does seem to involve more - for most observers - than the mere reception of impressions from the external environment.
This seems to be the opinion of those who make thinking a consequence of sensing, as well as of those who regard thought as independent of sense. For either, thinking goes beyond sensing, either as an elaboration of the information from the senses or as an apprehension of objects which are clearly beyond the reach of the senses.
Second Is The Fact
(of Knowledge or the process) Of Knowing:
This may be questioned on the ground that if there were sensation without any form of thought, judgement, or reasoning, there would be at least a rudimentary form of knowledge - some degree of consciousness or awareness by one thing of another. Granting the point of this objection, it nevertheless seems to be true that the distinction between truth and falsity, and the difference between knowledge, error, and ignorance, or knowledge, belief, and opinion, do not apply to sensations in the total absence of thought.
There is further implication of Mïnd in the fact of self-knowledge. Sensing may be awareness of an object and to this extent it may be a kind of knowing, but it has never been observed that the senses can sense or be aware of themselves.
Thought seems to be not only reflective, but reflexive, that is, able to consider itself, to define the nature of things and to develop theories of Mïnd. This fact about thought - its reflexivity - also seems to be a common element in all the meanings of Mïnd. It is sometimes referred to as the reflexivity of the intellect or as the reflexive power of understanding or as the ability of the understanding to reflect upon its own acts or as self-consciousness. Whatever the phrasing, a world without self-consciousness or self-knowledge would be a world in which traditional conception of Mïnd would probably not have arisen.
Third Is The Fact
(of Volition) - Of Intention:
Planning a course of action with foreknowledge of its goal, or working in any other way toward a desired and foreseen objective. As in the case of sensititivity, the phenomena of desire do not, without further qualification, indicate the realm of Mïnd. According to the theory of natural desire, for example, natural tendencies of even inanimate and insensitive things are expressions of desire that the fact of purpose or intention is here taken as evidence of Mïnd.
It is rather on the level of the behavior of living things that purpose seems to require a factor over and above the senses, limited as they are to present appearances. It cannot be found in the passions which have the same limitation as the senses, for unless they are checked, they tend toward immediate emotional discharge. That factor, called for by the direction of conduct to future ends, as either an element common to all meanings of Mïnd or is at least an element associated with Mïnd.
It is sometimes called the faculty of will - rational desire or the intellectual appetite. Sometimes it is treated as the act of willing which, along with thinking, is one of the two major activities of Mïnd or understanding; and sometimes purposiveness is regarded as the very essense of mentality.
These Three Facts - Thought, Knowledge, and Purpose -
seem to be common to all theories of Mïnd. They are not always related in the same way, however, to one another nor to the other relevant considerations. From such differences in interpretation and analysis arise the various conflicting concepts of the Human Mïnd.
The conflict of theories concerning what the Human Mïnd is, what structure it has, what parts belong to it or what whole it belongs to; does not comprise the entire range of controversy on the subject. Yet there is enough in common to all theories of Mïnd to permit certain other questions to be formulated.
How does the Human Mïnd operate? How does it do whatever is its work, and with what intrinsic excellencies or defects? What is the relation of Mïnd to matter, to bodily organs, to material conditions? Is Mïnd a common posession of men and animals, or is whatever might be called Mïnd in animals distinctly different from the Human Mïnd? Are these Mïnds or a Mïnd in existence apart from man and the whole world of corporeal life?
The questions generated by these conflicting concepts of the Human Mïnd depend to some extent on the divergent conceptions of the Human Mïnd from which they stem. It is necessary, therefore, to examine several notions of Mïnd which appear in many books of the great thinkers.
Several great thinkers in Mankind's history stand together in regarding Mïnd as only a part of the Human Soul.
«That in the soul which is called Mïnd,» writes Aristotle, «is that whereby the soul thinks and judges.» For him, as for Plato, the human intellect or reason is part or power of the soul of man dinstinct from other parts or faculties, such as the senses and the imagination, desire or passions. Though the human soul is distinguished from the souls of other living beings by virtue of its having this part or power, and is therefore called by Aristotle a «rational soul,» these writers do not identify Mïnd and soul. As soul is the principle of life and all vital activities, so Mïnd is the subordinate principle of knowledge and the activities of thinking, deliberating, and deciding.
Within the context of this theory, however, many differences exist between Aristotle, Plato, and others who subscribe to their interpretation. These differences arise with respect to not only the soul of which the intellect is part, but also with respect to the power or activity of the intellect itself. The distinction which Aristotle initiates between Mïnd as a passive power, is in contrast, more explicitly formulated by Acquinas in his theory of the active intellect and the intellect as potenital.
Thomas Acquinas writes,
«The human intellect is in potentiality to things intelligible, and is at first like a clean tablet on which nothing is written!» This is made clear from the fact that at first we are only in poetntiality towards understanding, and afterwards we are made to understand in actuality. And so it is evident that with us to understand is « in a way to be passive.» But the forms of things, or what Aquinas calls their «
intelligible species,» are not actually intelligible as they exist in material things. He therefore argues that in addition to the «power receptive of such species, which is called the 'possible intellect' by reason of its being in potentiiality to such species,» there must also be another intellectual power, which he calls the active or «agent intellect.»
The more explicit formulation which Aquinas gives of the distinction between the active and the possible intellects as dinstinct powers has furhter consequences for the analysis of three states of the passive or possible intellect distinguished by Aristotle. The intellectual power which is receptive of the intelligible species may either be in complete potentiality to them, as it is when it has not yet come to understand certain things. Or it may be described as in habitual possession of the intelligible species when it has previously acquired the understanding of certain things but is not now actually engaged in understanding them. In the third place, the potential intellect may also be actual or in act whenever it is actually exercising its habit of understanding or is for the first time actually understanding something.
In this traditional theory of Mïnd, many other distinctions are made in the sphere of mental activity, but none is thought to require a divsion of the Mïnd into two distinct powers, or even to require the discrimination of several states of the same power. Just as Plato regards the intuition or direct apprehension of intelligible objects as an activity of the same intelligence which is able to reason discursively about the ideas it can contemplate, so Aristotle and Aquinas assign three different activities to the intellectual objects, not by intuition, but only as a result of the abstraction of forms from matter by the active intellect.
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