Samuel Alexander Quotes

Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.

I'd even say it's a realistic film because that's the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea.

When we come to images or memories or thoughts, speculation, while always closely related to practice, is more explicit, and it is in fact not immediately obvious that such processes can be described in any sense as practical.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things.

Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.

It's useful to think of the imagination as an aspect of the body because it seems to have processes of its own that are obscure to us.

There are two distinct classes of what are called thoughts: those that we produce in ourselves by reflection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord.

Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience.

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

Thus the same object may supply a practical perception to one person and a speculative one to another, or the same person may perceive it partly practically and partly speculatively.

Even by common wisdom, there seem to be both people and objects in my dream that are outside myself, but clearly they were created in myself and are part of me, they are mental constructs in my own brain.

The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

In Psychology we deal with minds and their processes, and leave out of account as far as possible the objects that we get to know by means of them.

Whatever man does he must do first in his mind.

But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

We cannot therefore say that mental acts contain a cognitive as well as a conative element.