The Origin of Consciousness; An Attempt to Conceive the Mind as a Product of Evolution (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1918. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... chapter I givenness Twentieth-century philosophers have favoured us with the rather startling proposition that consciousness does not exist. They do not mean, of course, that a man is not sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious--it is not their purpose to deny the facts of sleep, anaesthetic or other, and waking--but their point is that consciousness is some sort of relation between existing objects, rather than itself an existence. In this I concur. It is precisely by conceiving consciousness as a relation, and specifying the relation, that I hope to explain the origin of consciousness. But when these philosophers tell us that the only existences are physical things, or neutral things, or things having nothing in any way psychic about their persons, one cannot but wonder whether they have not overlooked an important aspect of experience. I refer to the fact that all experiences, in order to be such, have to be given, and that an experience which is not given is not an experience. The truth is that the current and almost all-pervasive use of the term' consciousness' confuses together two perfectly distinct things, one of which is an undeniable fact of experience and the other an undeniable fact about experience. These are (1) psychic states, such as pains, desires, emotions, mental images, sensations, and (2) the function of awareness or givenness. The idea has been that psychic states are essentially states of awareness, 'states of consciousness' as the phrase is; their specific qualities or powers and their status as modes of awareness being fused together into the unity of a single fact, in which both of these elements may be introspectively discovered. This view of psychic states may be said to have been all-prevailing until, a few years since, James a...