Consciousness / by Henry Rutgers Marshall.

  • Henry Rutgers Marshall
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Consciousness / by Henry Rutgers Marshall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    adopted in this work, the word consciousness refers to psychic existence as such ; as, for instance, one speaks of the hypothetical consciousness of the plants. But one is likely also to hear someone say, “ you will not be conscious of the heat if you play a game of tennis with me,” and here the word is made to refer to states of “awareness” as opposed to mere “ sentience.” Evidently consciousness as a mere psychic existent does not necessarily imply awareness, which is a special reflective type of psychic existence, and I there- fore prefer to use the word in the broader sense, especially as the words unconsciousness and unconscious are employed almost invariably by the plain man, and the scientific writer as well, to refer to psychic-non-existence. Maudsley thus spoke of “ unconscious cerebration ” in referring to brain activities, to which under his view no psychic existences correspond : and thus the average man speaks of the unconsciousness of coma and of deep sleep, implying that they are states in connection with which nothing psychic exists.1 Sec. 2. If we employ the word consciousness in this broad way it may be said that at any moment, so far as I am concerned, the “ now ” of consciousness is all that exists, whether of me or of the universe for me. It is true that some phases of consciousness as grasped in reflection appear to involve more than my consciousness, appear to tell also of an objective world which is not of my consciousness, and which is not dependent upon the existence of my conscious- ness for its existence. But even so it is clear that if I conceive my consciousness annihilated I must conceive myself to be at that moment non-existent, and must agree 11 imagine that when Prof. James speaks of “pure experience” he refers to what I would here apply the word consciousness. But the word experience seems to me to be objectionable in that it connotes a somewhat that experiences, and thus may be taken to refer to what is really merely a certain phase of consciousness considered as a psychic existent.
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