The Mind And Knowledge: Preliminary Truths

The Mind and knowledge: Preliminary Truths By Peter Coffey

INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. THE MIND AND KNOWLEDGE : PRELIMINARY TRUTHS. i. NATURE OF MAN : His MENTAL FACULTIES : SENSES AND INTELLECT. Since Logic deals with thought and thought is a product of the mind, we cannot better approach our subject than by taking a general glance at the nature of the mind and the way in which it acquires knowledge. There is a special branch of philosophy which investigates all our mental activities : it is called Psychology. We will here take over from psychology, without any detailed analysis or discussion, those of its conclusions which will help to throw light upon the subject-matter of logic proper. The mutual bearings of logic and psychology will be explained further on (20). It is man himself, who, by his own thought, furnishes the subject-matter of logic. Now man is a corporeal being, existing in space and time like all other corporeal or material things, and, like them too, endowed with many mechanical, physical and chemical properties and powers; but he is also animate or living, i.e. organically constituted in his material structure, and endowed with life in common with the things of the vegetable or plant world ; and he is sentient also, capable of sense perceptions and sense desires, in common with the beings of the animal world; finally, he is rational, that is to say, possessed of a characteristic aptitude peculiar to himself and entitling him to a place apart in God s visible creation, the faculty of reason or intelligence (46). Such is man s composite nature ; and this nature is the remote principle or source of all his activities, rational, sentient, vegetative, and non-vital, all alike. The proximate principles or sources of his various activities are called faculties. To what faculty do his acts of thought belong, and by what features are we to recognize them? Well, even the very highest and noblest thoughts of man reveal the compositeness of his nature. They spring from his reason or intelligence, of course, but no single thought of his is an act of reason or intellect pure and simple. All his intellectual acts are dependent, both in their origin and in their actual exercise, on the antecedent and concomitant activity of other cognitive faculties of the lower or sense order, faculties which man possesses in common with animals, faculties which act only in and through some bodily organ. Of those faculties of sense knowledge or sense cognition, as they are called, some are known as external senses, others as internal senses. The external senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling or touching are our channels of information about the outer world. The internal senses of imagination, sense memory and sense consciousness recall or reproduce in our minds, and modify in many ways, the experiences of our external senses. All those sense faculties, external and internal, subserve and minister to the faculty of thought proper the reason, intelligence, intellect, understanding, as it is variously called. I cannot think of a thing unless some of these senses has already perceived it. Nor can I continue to think of it unless some of them continues to assist me. If I want to recall it to mind I must conjure up some sort of image of it: a natural image; or an outline or scheme or formula, such as the mathematician forms in geometry; or an imaginary model or design, such as the artist constructs in

his imagination to help him in the conception and execution of his work. All this deserves a little reflection. 2. DISTINCTION BETWEEN SENSE PERCEPTION AND INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTION: DEPENDENCE OF INTELLECTUAL THOUGHT UPON THE SENSE FACULTIES. The first or simplest exercise of the faculty of thought is called, in logic, Simple Apprehension or Conception. It is the process by which we form a concept or idea of any thing or object. To do this we need the assistance of the external senses; each of these seizing and presenting to our reason some sensible quality or other of external things. Here, for example, is a table-bell upon my desk; I look at it and ring it; my eye receives an impression which enables me to see the outline and colour of the bell, my ear an impression which enables me to hear a sound, my fingers the tactile impression which makes me conscious of the shape and resistance of the button pressed, and so on. These are so many distinct external sensations. But evidently these various sensible qualities of colour, outline, sound, resistance, etc., would remain isolated from one another in my mind, did I not possess the power or faculty of associating them. Both men and animals possess this power; it is a sense faculty, an internal sense; the ancients called it the Sensus Communis, modern philosophers call it the central sense, or the faculty of mental association. As those sensible impressions are made practically together, it is easy to understand that the sensations produced by them are associated with one another. The qualities perceived by the production of those sensations come into our consciousness as forming one whole; this whole, the resultant of as many factors as there are qualities perceived, constitutes what we call the sense object: the concrete, individual, material thing, existing here and now in the actual conditions and circumstances of time and space in which it is thus perceived by the senses. The cognitive activity of these latter is called sense perception, or sensation, and the conscious product of this activity is called a percept. Our sensations do not continue indefinitely in consciousness; but on passing out of consciousness they leave behind them traces of themselves, images of the sense qualities originally perceived. These images are preserved in the imagination and may be revived, or recalled to consciousness, by sense memory. Now it is by the exercise of those partly bodily and partly mental activities of external sense perception and imagination that we obtain possession of the materials or data necessary for thought proper. Aided by the sense percept or sense image, our purely mental faculty of thought, our intellect or reason, is able to form a concept or idea by which we apprehend what the thing is, get a rational knowledge of it, give it an intelligible interpretation or meaning and bestow upon it a name. In this we surpass the brute creation. Animals have indeed percepts and images of things; but they have not ideas or concepts; they do not understand what things are; they do not interpret their sense experiences as we interpret ours and theirs; nor have they language, the medium for expressing and communicating thought. It is difficult for the beginner, but it is very essential to accuracy, to distinguish clearly between sensation with its concrete images, and intellectual

thought with its abstract ideas; and to realize that it is intellectual thoughts or ideas or concepts that are expressed in human language, and that it is with these logic deals not with the products of the sense faculties, which products are only the raw materials of thought (9). To bring out the contrast between the two orders of mental product, the sensible and the intellectual, let us revert to our illustration of the table-bell. It will enable us to realize that while the object grasped by sense cognition is concrete, individual, and limited by conditions of time, place, and material existence, the object grasped by intellect, through the idea, is abstract, universal, and independent of all such changing conditions and limitations. The thing perceived by the senses or reproduced by the imagination is always a definite individual thing apprehended as composed of this matter, endowed with these properties, existing here at this particular moment. This thing (the table-bell), which I see with my eyes and touch with my hands, is made of this particular piece of bronze, round in shape, agreeable in tone, resting here and now on this particular corner of this particular desk. All this is perfectly determined. But I can also think of a table-bell not of bronze, nor round in shape, nor agreeable to hear, nor resting here and now upon my desk, of a table-bell which abstracts from all those particularities. No doubt, the table-bell thus thought of, apart from all those particular conditions, will, if it exist at all, be made of some metal or other; it will be of some shape or other; it will emit some sound or other; it will be localized some place or other, and exist at some time or other. But, as this table-bell of abstract thought may be made of any metal at all, be of any shape, yield any sound, exist anywhere and any time, it will evidently serve to represent to my mind, inadequately, of course, but faithfully as far as it goes, any and every possible and actual table-bell of whatsoever material, shape, sound and whereabouts. Any object or thing thus considered, apart from all the particularizing conditions with which it is really endowed when existing in the actual order of things, is called an abstract object; for to abstract mentally any object is precisely to consider apart "separatim considerare" that which the thing or object is, while laying aside the particular characteristics which give it this, that, or the other definite and determined individuality. Once an object is thus conceived in the abstract by the intellect, it is seen to be capable of being embodied or realized equally and indifferently in an indefinite multitude of individual instances: which is the same as saying that it becomes or is made universal by the consideration of the intellect. These two functions of abstracting and generalizing its objects are the characteristic features of the cognitive activity of human reason or intelligence. It is of the greatest importance to distinguish clearly between the concrete, individual thing, which is the object of mere sense perception or imagination, and the abstract, universal object, which is apprehended by thought proper. We can think, or have ideas, of objects which are not perceptible to our senses: for instance, objects not actually existent but only conceivable, such as a flying horse; or objects which we believe or know to exist, but to be unperceivable because not material, such as God, a pure spirit, the human soul, truth, virtue, similarity. And the things we do perceive by our senses we conceive by our intellects in a manner entirely different from that in which we perceive them. We perceive each numerical individual object of a class, as it exists in the concrete, John, James, Thomas, etc. We conceive the nature that is embodied or realized in each, and in virtue of which we put them into a common class, man; and we conceive this common human nature or humanity in the abstract, i.e. neglecting or not considering the different characteristics which particularize it in the individuals, John, James, Thomas, etc. Furthermore, we use this abstract and universal idea, man, for the purpose of interpreting for ourselves, or giving a meaning to, the individual

objects John, James, Thomas, etc., which come under the notice of our senses: by thinking to ourselves, "John is a man" "James is a man," "Thomas is a man" etc. The same is true of all our abstract and universal ideas. It is by means of these latter that we interpret or know intellectually the nature and the meaning of the Real World of Reality itself as this latter is revealed to us through our senses. This interpretation involves another exercise of thought the second act of the mind in logic the judgment. The first act conception by which we form abstract and universal concepts of individual sense objects, has many modalities which have secured for it many different names. For example, when the mind considers one object independently of the surrounding objects it is said to pay attention to this object. This attention may be brought to bear either upon one single attribute of an object, independently of the other qualities with which that attribute is united; or upon all the attributes which constitute the common, specific or class nature of the object, apart from the characteristics that individualize that nature in the actually existing world: those mental acts are called acts of abstraction. Abstraction is the basis of generalization, as explained above; moreover it effects a mental process which we call analysis, i.e. a taking asunder or decomposing of the elements or attributes of a known object. Furthermore, when the mind once again reunites the attributes thus previously isolated, it carries on a work of synthesis. But in these activities judgment is involved as well as conception (9). 3. JUDGMENT OR INTERPRETATION : INFERENCE OR REASONING. -Not only, therefore, do we form abstract and universal concepts or notions, by means of which we understand more or less fully what the things are which come under the notice of our senses. We also interpret the individual objects revealed to our senses by affirming or denying the contents of those abstract and universal ideas about those things. I see an object in the distance. I proceed to think to myself about it thus: "That is something; it is a material thing or being of some sort; it is not a pillar, nor a tree; it is moving; it is an animal of some sort; it is a horse". All these mental affirmations and denials are thoughts of another sort, thoughts by which we compare objects we have already conceived, by which we apprehend a relation of agreement or disagreement between things already perceived and conceived, and thus get a fuller insight into what the things are about which we are thinking. This act of comparison is called judgment. By means of it we interpret the individual things revealed to our senses by affirming or denying about these things the objects we have already conceived in the abstract when forming our universal ideas (thing or being, material, moving, life, tree, animal, horse, etc.). The act of judgment is thus an act by which we apprehend the identity or non-identity of the objects of two previous apprehensions. It is an apprehensio complexa or complexorum as opposed to the " simple " apprehension apprehensio incomplexa or incomplexorum by which we conceive an object in the abstract without making any mental affirmation or denial about it. But conception and judgment are fundamentally the same sort of mental act, an intellectual intuition of what some thing is. So, too, is what logic calls the third act of the mind, the act of reasoning or inference. This is the process by which our reason so compares with one another the ideas and judgments it has already formed that it thereby apprehends new relations between the latter, and thus reaches fresh judgments and additional knowledge or truth about things. Here, too, no less than in judgment, the object apprehended by the intellect is a relation of identity or difference between previously conceived objects : and this new apprehension involves, of course, a fuller and better understanding of what some thing is <( qucd quid est" . Conception, judgment, and reasoning are, therefore, fundamentally one and the same type of mental process the under standing of the nature of a thing. They are all alike acts of the same faculty the intellect or reason.

4. RELATION OF UNIVERSAL IDEAS TO INDIVIDUAL THINGS. Our senses, external and internal, are the channels through which the things that make up the real world come into contact with our minds. All our knowledge is gathered by judging or interpreting intellectually the data revealed to our consciousness through the operation of our senses, and by reasoning from those data. There is a philosophical aphorism : Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu : which does not mean, of course, that we can know nothing except the things actually revealed to our senses, i.e. material things ; but which does mean that whatever we do know, even about suprasensible (or spiritual} things, we know by reasoning intellectually from what is revealed to our senses. The abstract and universal ideas themselves, by which we interpret those sense data (e.g. the ideas of thing, matter, motion, life, tree^ horse, etc.), we get by intellectual conception (or abstraction] from those data. Precisely the same realities which are apprehended by our senses as concrete, individual, determinate, and incommunicable, are apprehended by our intellect in a state in which they appear abstract, universal, indeterminate, and common or communicable, i.e. realizable equally in an indefinite multitude of individuals. In other words, our senses and our intellect attain to the same realities but in different ways. While our senses apprehend material things in the condition in which these really exist, i.e. as concrete, individual, separate from one another, changeable and changing in time and space, our intellect grasps a portion greater or less of the nature of these things, the portion common to larger or smaller groups of them, the common or class essences, the generic and specific essences of these things, and it conceives this common portion in the abstract, i.e. in a static, unchanging condition, apart from the influences to which it is submitted in the state in which it is actually found in individual material things. Thus, while my senses perceive, or my imagination pictures, the individual John, my intellect conceives, as embodied in that individual, the various portions of his essence which make him belong to various classes of things, e.g. that he is a corporeal being, living, sentient, rational. When, therefore, I interpret any individual object of sense experience by attributing to it the object of some universal idea when, for example, I say "John is a man" I mean to assert that the object of my universal idea, the entity, essence or nature represented by it (e.g. human nature] is embodied in, and constitutes (partially, at least), the individual sense object (John). I do not mean to assert that the object of my universal idea exists in the individual sense object in the same way in which the former is apprehended by my mind. If I did, my statement that "John is a man" would be false and so would all statements asserting universal attributes about individual things. For every object conceived by the intellect through a universal idea (e.g. man) is conceived apart from individualizing conditions, as abstract, and hence as universal, i.e. common or communicable to, and realizable in, an indefinite multitude of individuals; whereas that same object, as it exists in the individual (e.g. John], is concrete and individualized and incommunicable to others, and cannot be attributed to others, John is himself only; nobody else is John: but while John is a man, so is James also a man: man can be attributed to both and to an indefinite multitude. And it can be attributed to them truly, for each assertion means only that the object of my universal idea human nature is really in each and every one of the individuals, though not in the same way as it is conceived by my mind. It is multiplied or repeated numerically in each of them; while as conceived in the abstract by my intel lect it is one and common and communicable, or indefinitely multipliable. Again, when I interpret the individual things of sense by means of universal ideas the contents of which I attribute to those things in such judgments as "John is a man," or "John is a living being," or "John is not a spirit," I do not imply that these universal ideas are adequate representations of the individual things, or exhaust all that can be known about the latter. I only claim that they are faithful and give me true knowledge so far as they go. They reveal to me the common generic and specific essences of the realities revealed to my senses, but not the

whole individual essence or nature of any one of them. I admit that they are inadequate: that no number of abstract ideas about an individual thing will give me a full and complete insight into its reality. But this is an essential limitation of the human mind itself. We are not omniscient. We have thus accounted for the origin of our universal ideas by asserting that they are all abstracted by the intellect from the individual data revealed to consciousness by the operation of our senses. We regard as erroneous the view that some or all of them are not thus derived from sense data, but are in some form or other innate or inherent in the intellect, independently of, and anterior to, the operation of our senses. The question is purely psychological. We have accounted also for the validity of our universal ideas in other words, for the trustworthiness of the role they fulfil for us in interpreting the realities revealed to us through our senses, and thus giving us an insight into the nature of those realities by pointing out what we conceive to be the true relation of the universal idea to the singular sense object. This relation we have explained by saying that the object of the universal idea is really embodied in, and constitutes partially the nature, the very reality, of the individual sense object; but that the feature of universality which characterizes the object of the universal idea as apprehended by the intellect, does not belong to that object as the latter exists in the individual things of the world: that it is a modality added on to the object by the consideration of the intellect itself. The intellect, therefore, rightly and truly attributes the object of its universal idea to the individual thing, but not the universality of that object; for the universality is a mental mode added on by the intellect hence called in scholastic philosophy " intentio universalitatis ". 5. THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL IDEAS : SOLUTIONS. The account just given of the relation of our universal ideas to the individual things about which we affirm or deny the former in our acts of judgment, is known as the doctrine of MODERATE REALISM. It is summed up in the scholastic formula : Universale est formaliter in mente, sed fundamentaliter in re. The object apprehended by means of a universal concept is called a Universal because it is something which is conceived as common to many things, something that is or may be attributed to many things in our judgments, something that is conceived as common to all the members of a class. What is this something? The answer of moderate realism is that this something is a reality (hence the name, " Realism ") which is present in the individual things of sense ("in re") helping to constitute the essence or reality of the latter; it is, however, not present in them as one in all of them, but as multiplied and numerically distinct in each; in a manner, therefore, which serves as a foundation ("fundamentaliter") for the formation of one concept that will represent equally well all the realizations of the object in the individuals; nor is it, as it really exists in the individuals, formally universal, common, communicable; for whatever exists really is individual and incommunicable: Plato's human nature is his own and cannot be any body elses; human nature exists as formally and explicitly universal only in our thought; as universal it is only a concept (" Universale est formaliter in mente"}. The above is not the only answer that has been given to the question: What are those objects or entities which we apprehend as universal, common, communicable, in our universal ideas, and what relation have they to the things revealed to us through our senses? The "Problem of the Universals," as it is called, has received other and erroneous solutions. It is of fundamental importance in philosophy; and that is why, notwithstanding its difficulty, we introduce it at this early stage. It is desirable that the student should have the correct orientation on the question from the start. But since the problem is not properly a logical one we merely indicate here the leading solutions it has received from philosophers. Besides the solution given above which was first outlined by Aristotle and then

developed by the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, especially by St. Thomas Aquinas, and which we regard as the only correct one, there is a view known as EXTREME or EXAGGERATED REALISM. According to this view the universal (i.e. what is present to our minds when we form any of those universal concepts or ideas expressed by common or class names, such as man, animal, good, unhappiness, etc.) is not only a reality distinct from the mind, but exists really as a universal outside the mind. Plato taught thatthese universals exist apart from the world revealed to our senses, and constitute what is in truth the only real world, the world revealed to our senses being but a faint shadow of the real world (Platonic Realism). Other philosophers taught that the universals which we conceive intellectually have their real being as such in the Divine Mind, and that our intellects have a direct intuition of them there (Ontologistic Realism). Others again believed that the universals exist actually as such in the individual things of the world revealed to us through our senses; that they are not multiplied numerically in each individual thing, but that the one common essence (e.g. humanity} is numerically the same in all individuals, these being, therefore, manifestations apparently distinct of what is really one single reality (Empiric Realism). This view would lead logically to what is known as Monism or Pantheism in philosophy: the doctrine that all existing reality is one single being: that all distinctions are only apparent, none real. Passing from exaggerated realism we find at the opposite extreme the erroneous doctrine of NOMINALISM. According to this view not only is the universal as such not a reality, but it is not even an idea; it is a mere name (hence the title, Nominalism}, a mere term. This term (e.g. man] has nothing real corresponding to it except individuals (John, James, Thomas); and it has nothing mental corresponding to it except our perceptions of actual individuals or our imagination images (some definite, some vague, composite, modified, confused) of individuals formerly perceived. The universal would be simply a common name serving as a label or mark for numerous more or less similar individuals; but we are supposed to have no concept or idea of that common element which exists in the similar things and is the ground of their similarity. This is a modern doctrine, prevalent for the last few centuries, especially in England from the days of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, etc., and supported later by Bain and Mill. It is based on an erroneous view of the nature of the human mind: the view, namely, that man has no other faculties of knowledge than external and internal sense faculties, that reason or intellect is a sense faculty which acts through a bodily organ, that all our knowledge is reducible to sensations. This system is at variance with an accurate interpretation of the facts of consciousness. It is impossible to deny seriously that, besides sense percepts and imagination images, we have also in our minds, corresponding to the universal terms of our language, other representations not of a sensible, but of an intellectual order: notions, concepts, ideas by which we interpret the individual things of sense experience. Between the error of Nominalism which holds that Universals are mere names, and Moderate Realism which teaches that they are mental representations of extramental realities, comes another erroneous view known as CONCEPTUALISM, which teaches that Universals are mere concepts of the intellect, mere mental constructions having no reality outside the mind to correspond to them. This opinion was propounded by some mediaeval philosophers, and in recent times under a new and more erroneous form by the German philosopher, Kant (1724-1804), and his numerous followers. If universals were mere concepts of the intellect they would not be validly applicable to the things revealed to us through our senses; and since it is by applying these concepts to things that we interpret the latter and get all our knowledge about them, this knowledge would, in the conceptualist view, be fictitious: it would not be a knowledge of real things at all but only of intellectual notions. People generally believe, and rightly, that the various sciences give us genuine knowledge about real things; but science is made up of truths that hold good universally, i.e. of truths about universal natures, such as the truth that

"Water boils at 100 C. at the sea-level"; and if these universal natures are only concepts of the mind the sciences can give us no information about things but only about our own mental notions and the language in which these are expressed. 6. SOME MODERN SPECULATIONS ON UNIVERSAL IDEAS. Moderate Realism takes this as self-evident: that whatever really exists is really an individual thing, definite and determined, itself and no other; that it is not common to others and cannot be attributed to others; and that it is only by being intellectually conceived in the abstract, by becoming an object of intellectual thought, that a thing is stripped of its individuality, loses its incommunicability and becomes attributable to many "praedicabile de multis, universale in praedicando". Plato, however, contended that it is not the individual at all that is real, but only the universal; and some modern philosophers, believing that the universal (as such) has as good a claim to be considered real as the individual (as such), and seeing that the universal as such is essentially conceptual, ideal, mental, have concluded that the individual and the universal, or, in other words, the real (of sense) and the ideal (of intellect) are the same. This is the doctrine of the German philosopher, Hegel (1770-1831), a sort of idealistic monism which breaks down all distinction between thought and thing. A similar theory has the support, in England, of Green, Bosanquet, and Bradley, among others. These writers confound the conceptual identity of the universal nature, based on similarity of really distinct individuals, with real identity. When I say, "John is a man," and then, "James is a man," the nature which I assert to be embodied in, and really identical with, John, I apprehend to be really and numerically distinct from, though similar to, the nature I assert to be embodied in, and identical with, James. The two really distinct natures are so similar, as embodied in the two individuals, that I can represent these natures by one and the same concept and describe them by the same name, human. This conceptual identity the writers referred to seem to confound with real identity. Were the nature I attributed to John really identical with that I attributed to James, I should be entitled to conclude that John and James are really identical a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of this latest speculation on the significance of the Universal MERCIER Logique (Louvain, 1905), c. i. On the Universal; JOYCE, Principles of Logic (Longmans, 1908), pp. 132-36. MERCIER, Criteriologie Generate (Louvain, 1906), pp. 337 sqq. DE WULF, History of Medieval Philosophy (Longmans, 1909), pp. 149 sqq., 321 sqq., 421 sqq. MAKER, Psychology (6th edit.), pp. 294 sqq. JOSEPH, Logic, pp. 20 sqq., 49 sqq., 55 sqq.