Ralph Cudworth Quotes

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.

I can well conceive a man without hands, feet, head. But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.

It can't be Nature, for it is not sense.

Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.

the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal; it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.

If I use the word consciousness, in our lab, in our institute, what we mean is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in the mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we, ourselves, exist, and that things exist around us.

Demonstration, similitude & harmony are objects of reasoning. Invention, identity & melody are objects of intuition.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

The organ of perception acts more readily than judgment.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

I cannot have God in my heart if he is not in my head. Before I can believe in, I must believe that.

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

Eyesight should learn from reason.

Sense will always have attractions for me.

First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas