The relation of acts and contents of consciousness / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
1935?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The relation of acts and contents of consciousness / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mental activity, and (iii) in some way closely related to the two foregoing—the affective consciousness. It is mainly the relation to one another of the first two of these three modes of conscious¬ ness to which I venture to direct your attention to-day—the relation between what are commonly called (a) the acts (or, to use a variant, but perhaps not quite equivalent, term, the proces¬ ses) of consciousness and (b) the contents (or correspondingly, the products) of consciousness, or the conscious ‘material’ on which conscious mental work may be performed. In the brief time at my disposal I shall only be able to allude cursorily to the important third, or affective, mode of consciousness—the feelings. I thought, too, that we might all agree in what is meant by the ‘acts’ and by the ‘contents’, ‘products’ or ‘material’ of conscious¬ ness. On the one hand, we readily recognize the conscious acts of apprehending, relating, recalling, etc.; on the other hand, distinct from these, are the equally obvious, conscious ‘products’ of those acts—what is apprehended, what relation comes to be discerned, what is recalled, etc. On the one hand, too, stand the conscious acts of attending, deliberating, deciding; on the other hand stands the conscious ‘material’ to which we attend, about which we deliber¬ ate, on which we decide. We should further agree, I thought, that all conscious acts are acts of what we term the ‘self’ — in other words, that all conscious activity invariably implies self-activity, and that, without some kind of ‘self’ (however rudimentary) which might receive or act on the results of other mental activity within the organism, there can be no consciousness either of act or of product of mental activity. It is evident, however, that not all conscious ‘material’ or contents appear to be the products of conscious activity: for example, we are not bound to be consciously thinking in order that an idea should occur to us, and we receive sensations from stimuli and perceptions of familiar objects without being cons¬ ciously active of the processes of sensing and perceiving. Hence arose the notion of conscious ‘presentations’ to the consciously active self; and hence, too, we may, at first sight at all events, conclude that the contents of consciousness may occur under one of two alternative conditions, namely either as the result of, or in the absence of, acts of consciousness. At first sight, too, we may be tempted to conclude that, just as