The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (red queen free ebook txt) 📕

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