"The Analysis Of Mind " - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Bertrand)

(psycho-analysis).

Few things are more firmly established in popular philosophy than
the distinction between mind and matter. Those who are not
professional metaphysicians are willing to confess that they do
not know what mind actually is, or how matter is constituted; but
they remain convinced that there is an impassable gulf between
the two, and that both belong to what actually exists in the
world. Philosophers, on the other hand, have maintained often
that matter is a mere fiction imagined by mind, and sometimes
that mind is a mere property of a certain kind of matter. Those
who maintain that mind is the reality and matter an evil dream
are called "idealists"--a word which has a different meaning in
philosophy from that which it bears in ordinary life. Those who
argue that matter is the reality and mind a mere property of
protoplasm are called "materialists." They have been rare among
philosophers, but common, at certain periods, among men of
science. Idealists, materialists, and ordinary mortals have been
in agreement on one point: that they knew sufficiently what they
meant by the words "mind" and "matter" to be able to conduct
their debate intelligently. Yet it was just in this point, as to
which they were at one, that they seem to me to have been all
alike in error.

The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in
my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive
than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the
stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the
two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. As
regards matter, I have set forth my reasons for this view on
former occasions,* and I shall not now repeat them. But the
question of mind is more difficult, and it is this question that
I propose to discuss in these lectures. A great deal of what I
shall have to say is not original; indeed, much recent work, in
various fields, has tended to show the necessity of such theories
as those which I shall be advocating. Accordingly in this first
lecture I shall try to give a brief description of the systems of
ideas within which our investigation is to be carried on.

* "Our Knowledge of the External World" (Allen & Unwin), Chapters
III and IV. Also "Mysticism and Logic," Essays VII and VIII.


If there is one thing that may be said, in the popular
estimation, to characterize mind, that one thing is
"consciousness." We say that we are "conscious" of what we see
and hear, of what we remember, and of our own thoughts and
feelings. Most of us believe that tables and chairs are not
"conscious." We think that when we sit in a chair, we are aware
of sitting in it, but it is not aware of being sat in. It cannot