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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    to exhaust the consciousness of the moment, but appears to stand over against a something else of consciousness which is vague and elusive. This vague and elusive psychic “ something else of consciousness ” we call the Self, and the relatively clear and distinct somewhat is commonly now-a-days spoken of as the presentation to the Self. This presentative somewhat we may speak of as a psychic emphasis within consciousness, reserving for the moment any attempt to justify this use of the term. Some of those who employ the word presentation hold on metaphysical grounds that the presentation is given to a Self which is beyond consciousness. I would ask the reader to note that I look upon the Self1 as part and parcel of the consciousness in which the presentations appear. Sec. 4. At times there seems to emerge, as it were, out of this vague and elusive “ something else of consciousness ” to which presentations are given, a somewhat more explicit with which these same presentations also appear to stand in contrast, and then we find ourselves assuming a special attitude which we describe as that of self-consciousness. We then experience not only that psychic emphasis (e.g. a bright light) which a moment ago appeared merely as a presentation within consciousness which it did not exhaust, but we experience this psychic emphasis as an object related to an ego (e.g. when I experience the fact that / am sensible of the bright sensation), both this object and the ego to which the object is related together standing contrasted still with a something else of consciousness. What was before a presentation to the Self retains this presentative charac- teristic, but has become bound up with an ego which also appears as part of a presentation to the Self. The dual whole,—the object and the ego itself,—is thus a complex psychic emphasis standing in contrast with the rest of 11 refer here of course to the Self of the moment in which the pre- sentation is given, and not to the conceptual Self which we study later.
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