[16] Locke, _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_, Book I, chap. i,
Sec.Sec. 4, 5, 6.
[17] _Kritik der reinen Vernunft._ Ed. Hartenstein, p. 256.
CHAPTER II.
THE CONTENTS OF THE MIND.
In the language of common life, the "mind" is spoken of as an entity,
independent of the body, though resident in and closely connected with
it, and endowed with numerous "faculties," such as sensibility,
understanding, memory, volition, which stand in the same relation to the
mind as the organs do to the body, and perform the functions of feeling,
reasoning, remembering, and willing. Of these functions, some, such as
sensation, are supposed to be merely passive--that is, they are called
into existence by impressions, made upon the sensitive faculty by a
material world of real objects, of which our sensations are supposed to
give us pictures; others, such as the memory and the reasoning faculty,
are considered to be partly passive and partly active; while volition is
held to be potentially, if not always actually, a spontaneous activity.
The popular classification and terminology of the phenomena of
consciousness, however, are by no means the first crude conceptions
suggested by common sense, but rather a legacy, and, in many respects, a
sufficiently _damnosa haereditas_, of ancient philosophy, more or less
leavened by theology; which has incorporated itself with the common
thought of later times, as the vices of the aristocracy of one age
become those of the mob in the next.
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