the
"thing" which it represents. When you hear a donkey bray, you not only
hear a noise, but realize that it comes from a donkey. When you see a
table, you not only see a coloured surface, but realize that it is hard.
The addition of these elements that go beyond crude sensation is said to
constitute perception. We shall have more to say about this at a later
stage. For the moment, I am merely concerned to note that perception
of objects is one of the most obvious examples of what is called
"consciousness." We are "conscious" of anything that we perceive.
We may take next the way of MEMORY. If I set to work to recall what
I did this morning, that is a form of consciousness different from
perception, since it is concerned with the past. There are various
problems as to how we can be conscious now of what no longer exists.
These will be dealt with incidentally when we come to the analysis of
memory.
From memory it is an easy step to what are called "ideas"--not in the
Platonic sense, but in that of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, in which they
are opposed to "impressions." You may be conscious of a friend either
by seeing him or by "thinking" of him; and by "thought" you can be
conscious of objects which cannot be seen, such as the human race,
or physiology. "Thought" in the narrower sense is that form of
consciousness which consists in "ideas" as opposed to impressions or
mere memories.
We may end our preliminary catalogue with BELIEF, by which I mean that
way of being conscious which may be either true or false. We say that a
man is "conscious of looking a fool," by which we mean that he believes
he looks a fool, and is not mistaken in this belief. This is a different
form of consciousness from any of the earlier ones. It is the form which
gives "knowledge" in the strict sense, and also error. It is, at least
apparently, more complex than our previous forms of consciousness;
though we shall find that they are not so separable from it as they
might appear to be.
Besides ways of being conscious there are other things that would
ordinarily be called "mental," such as desire and pleasure and pain.
These raise problems of their own, which we shall reach in Lecture III.
But the hardest problems are those that arise concerning ways of being
"conscious." These ways, taken together, are called the "cognitive"
elements in mind, and it is these that will occupy us most during the
following lectures.
There is one element whi
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