The nature of mental activity / a symposium by ... S. Alexander ... J. Ward, C. Read, and G.F. Stout.

  • Alexander, Samuel
Date:
1908
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nature of mental activity / a symposium by ... S. Alexander ... J. Ward, C. Read, and G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    In speaking thus of movement and change of direction, and I may add of rate of movement, I am of course obliged to use anticipatory terms derived from physical objects, describing not merely the mental activity as I am aware of it, but as it is connected with bodily processes which occur in the organism and more particularly in the brain. I make it clearer to myself by locating it in time or space in a picture of my brain. Tennyson says “as when a great thought strikes along the brain and flushes all the cheek.” The second phrase describes only a consequence, but in all my thoughts, little or great and of all kinds, I verify the description that they strike along the brain. Now that I know what my brain is, I feel my thought occurring there, or, if not there, in some other part of my body. It is only as thus understood in connection with the bodily organism that I can say my mental activity is a movement with direction. But in this sense it is a movement, and does occur in time and space. In other words, my mental activity is always qualified by what, on the analogy of Jocal signs, I must call signs of direction. When I change my thoughts from one topic to another, I have an experience which I can only compare to the shifting of the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope when it is turned, and this experience is not the same as the movements of the eyes in which, with me, it is habitually expressed. Movements like these or lke catching the breath, or the flushing of the cheek of which the poet speaks, may be present in various degrees, but these movements I can distinguish perfectly well from the move- ments, simple or complex, which I have described as mental, changing their direction with the subject matter, but always when made definite and explicit referred to the brain. — Now what makes one thought-process different from another is, I find, nothing but this differénce of mental direc- tion. It is not the object or content of the thought. When the cbject is different the direction of my activity is different, ‘but the object has nothing to do with my mind. “Moreover,
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