Samuel Alexander Quotes

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.

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.

As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which is the instrument of thought.

Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life.

Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in.

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

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.

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.

The results of ethnic psychology constitute, at the same time, our chief source of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental processes.

The actuality of thought is life.

Thought is the measure of life.

...is the carbon molecule lined with thought?

Concepts are mental images.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

The behaviorist advances the view that what the psychologists have hitherto called thought is in short nothing but talking to ourselves.

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

Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.

Well, it's not all the same, but there are a lot of parallels. I'm not sure how to answer [on psychology background], but I think when I was studying psychology I had a professor and a friend who would talk about "process" all the time. Your process, his process, the group's process. There's some carryover from that discussion to my creative work.

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.

Whatever we know without inference is mental.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.