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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    outer-world conceptual object which is conceived of as having perceptual potentiality, and this change is judged to correspond with the change in the non-object-in-the- outer-world presentation which we call the pricking pain. Changes in this activity of nerve thus seem to correspond with changes in the form of consciousness which we speak of as purely internal, or subjective ; and this correspondence has been observed in so wide an array of cases that neurolo- gists and psychologists in general have come to the conclusion that in all probability all changes in conscious life correspond with changes in this activity of nerve ;—even the very con- ception of “ action of nerve ” itself corresponding with a conceptual action of nerve not at the moment presented in consciousness. This from our present point of view is the hypothesis of neururgic and noetic1 correspondence to which we refer often below. Sec. 8. The natural man does not distinguish between the objective (Class E) and the subjective (Class C apart from Class E), as any one who questions him may easily discover ; and this leads us to surmise that in the beginning JI have adopted this word “neururgic,” meaning “relating to the activity of nerve,” because there seems to be no word in current use which has this specific meaning, and which is free from disturbing connotations. I first used it in an article published in Mind for October 1902. Dr. Maudsley (Mind, 48) used the words “ neurotic pattern,” and William Cyples in his Process of Human Experience used the phrase “neurotic diagram” in somewhat the same sense in which I use later on the phrase “neururgic pattern.” The word noetic has been used by Hamilton “ to express those cognitions which originate in the mind itself,” in contradistinction to those determined by impressions from without; and in this use of the term he has been followed by other writers. Dr. Stout in his Analytic Psychology distinguishes between “noetic” and “anoetic” mental states, but he acknowledges (vol. i. p. 171) “that the antithesis of active and passive states of mind is not absolute; instead of a well-marked transition from the presence of activity to its complete absence, we find a series of insensible gradations.” As I hold that there is no difference of kind in mental activity in the direction indicated there seems to be ample justification for my use of the word “ noetic ” in this connection, in consideration of its convenience.
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