Bewilderment

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Janet these secondary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman has. For our present purpose it is unimportant whether this account of the origin of secondary selves is applicable to all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is true of a large number of them. Now although the size of a secondary self thus formed will depend on the number of thoughts that are thus split-off from the main consciousness, the form , of it tends to personality, and the later thoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones and adopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual moment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary personalities in his anæsthetic somnambulist Lucie. He found that when this young woman's attention was absorbed in conversation with a third party, her anæsthetic hand would write simple answers to questions whispered to her by himself. "Do you hear?" he asked. "No ," was the unconsciously written reply. "But to answer you must hear." "Yes, quite so ." "Then how do you manage?" "I don't know ." "There must be some one who hears me." "Yes ." "Who?" "Someone other than Lucie ." "Ah! another person. Shall we give her a name?" "No ." "Yes, it will be more convenient." "Well, Adrienne, then ." "Once baptized, the subconscious personage," M. Janet continues, "grows more definitely outlined and displays better her psychological characters. In particular she shows us that she is conscious of the feelings excluded from the consciousness of the primary or normal personage. She it is who tells us that I am pinching the arm or touching the little finger in which Lucie for so long has had no tactile sensations."[216] In other cases the adoption of the name by the secondary self is more spontaneous. I have seen a number of incipient automatic writers and mediums as yet imperfectly 'developed,' who immediately and of their own accord write and speak in the name of departed spirits. These may be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday, or real persons formerly known to the subject, or altogether imaginary beings. Without prejudicing the question of real 'spirit-control' in the more developed sorts of trance-utterance, I incline to think that these (often deplorably unintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work of an inferior fraction of the subject's own natural mind, set free from control by the rest, and working after a set pattern fixed by the prejudices of the social environment.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  “I knew that was taking place over there,” Tony said. “But I didn’t know it was that bad.” I call Tony a beat poet because he is always wearing loose European shirts, the ones that lace up the chest with shoestring. His head is shaved, and he has a long soul patch that stretches a good inch beneath his chin. He isn’t actually a poet. “It’s terrible,” I told him. “Two and a half million people, dead. In one village they interviewed about fifty or so women. All of them had been raped, most of them numerous times.” Tony shook his head. “That is amazing. It is so difficult to even process how things like that can happen.” “I know. I can’t get my mind around it. I keep wondering how people could do things like that.” “Do you think you could do something like that, Don?” Tony looked at me pretty seriously. I honestly couldn’t believe he was asking the question. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you capable of murder or rape or any of the stuff that is taking place over there?” “No.” “So you are not capable of any of those things?” he asked again. He packed his pipe and looked at me to confirm my answer. “No, I couldn’t,” I told him. “What are you getting at?” “I just want to know what makes those guys over there any different from you and me. They are human. We are human. Why are we any better than them, you know?” Tony had me on this one. If I answered his question by saying yes, I could commit those atrocities, that would make me evil, but if I answered no, it would suggest I believed I am better evolved than some of the men in the Congo. And then I would have some explaining to do. “You believe we are capable of those things, don’t you, Tony?” He lit his pipe and breathed in until the tobacco glowed orange and let out a cloud of smoke. “I think so, Don. I don’t know how else to answer the question.” “What you are really saying is that we have a sin nature, like the fundamentalist Christians say.” Tony took the pipe from his lips. “Pretty much, Don. It just explains a lot, you know.” “Actually,” I told him reluctantly, “I have always agreed with the idea that we have a sin nature. I don’t think it looks exactly like the fundamentalists say it does, ’cause I know so many people who do great things, but I do buy the idea we are flawed, that there is something in us that is broken. I think it is easier to do bad things than good things. And there is something in that basic fact, some little clue to the meaning of the universe.” “It’s funny how little we think about it, isn’t it?” Tony shook his head.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Tony came down at nine o'clock and was amazed to find her father still at the coffee table with the Consul. After being kissed on the forehead, she sat down fresh, hungry and with eyes red from sleep, took sugar and butter and helped herself to green herb cheese. "How nice, papa, to see you again!" she said, taking hold of her hot egg with the napkin and opening it with the teaspoon. "I was waiting for our late riser today," said the Consul, who was smoking a cigar and persistently banging the folded newspaper on the table. For her part, the Consul slowly and gracefully finished her breakfast and then leaned back on the sofa. "Thilda is already busy in the kitchen," the Consul continued meaningfully, "and I would be at my work too if your mother and I didn't have a serious matter to talk to our little daughter about." Tony, mouth full of bread and butter, looked at her father and then at her mother with a mixture of curiosity and alarm. "Eat first, my child," said the consul, and when Tony put down her knife anyway and called out, "Bring it out right away, please, papa!" repeated the consul, who didn't stop playing with the newspaper: " Just eat.” As Tony sipped her coffee in silence and without an appetite, ate her egg and green cheese with her sandwich, she began to suspect what it was about. The morning freshness disappeared from her face, she turned a little pale, she thanked me for honey and soon announced in a low voice that she was done... "My dear child," said the Consul, after a moment's silence, "the question we have to discuss with you is contained in this letter." large bluish envelope on the table. “To put it briefly: Mr. Bendix Grünlich, whom we all have come to know as a good and amiable man, writes to me that during his stay here he developed a deep affection for our daughter and formally asks for her hand. What does our good child think of that?' Tony sat back with his head bowed and her right hand slowly turning the silver napkin ring around itself. But suddenly her eyes opened, eyes that had grown quite dark and were full of tears. And in a troubled voice she blurted out: “What does this man want from me –! What have I done to him -?!' At which she burst into tears. – The Consul glanced at his wife and looked at his empty cup, a little embarrassed. 'Dear Tony,' said the Consul softly, 'what's the point of this echauffement! You can be sure, can't you, that your parents only have your best interest in mind and that they cannot advise you to turn down the job that is being offered to you. You see, I assume that you don't yet harbor any decisive feelings for Herr Grünlich, but that will come, I assure you, that will come with time...

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  43 (London, 1882). [397] Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39. [398] Analysis, chap. VIII. [399] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12. [400] It may add to the effect of the text to quote a passage from the essay in 'Mind,' referred to on p. 150. "Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the universal sense of a word does correspond to a mental fact of some kind, but at the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all mental facts are modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a 'feeling'? Man meant for mankind is in short a different feeling from man as a mere noise, or from man meant for that man, to wit, John Smith alone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when taken universally, the word has one of Mr. Galton's 'blended' images of man associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that these blended or, as Prof. Huxley calls them, 'generic' images are equivalent to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as a sharp thing; and the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on its being felt with its representative function . This function is the mysterious plus , the understood meaning. But it is nothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting a supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as continuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is just that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of other imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we have so absolutely set forth [in Chapter IX]. "If the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing, or event; if it come fringed, it may reveal something expressly taken universally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought and feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence or absence of 'fringe.' And this in turn reduces itself, with much probability, in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub-excitements in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges underlie the more definite nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of the thought,—in this instance, the word or image it may happen to arouse. "The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between certain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others called acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing things, knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combine the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep. The contrast is really between two aspects , in which all mental facts without exception may be taken; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all in vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt, saunter into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says, as innocently as if it had never been sent for. Experiences of bygone date will revive after years of absolute oblivion, often as the result of some cerebral disease or accident which seems to develop latent paths of association, as the photographer's fluid develops the picture sleeping in the collodion film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Coleridge's: "In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only a few could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick was out of the question; the woman was a simple creature; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long before any explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be obtained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who determined to trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble, discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found several of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rabbinical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman's bedside were identified that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source."[599] Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that has happened in their trance. But in a succeeding trance they will often remember the events of a past one. This is like what happens in those cases of 'double personality' in which no recollection of one of the lives is to be found in the other. We have already seen in an earlier chapter that the sensibility often differs from one of the alternate personalities to another, and we have heard M. Pierre Janet's theory that anæsthesias carry amnesias with them (see above, pp. 253 ff.).

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  First, it apprehends the inverted retinal image and turns it right side up, constructing flat space as a preliminary operation; then it computes from the angle of convergence of the eyeballs that the two retinal images must be the projection of but a single object ; thirdly, it constructs the third dimension and sees this object solid ; fourthly, it assigns its distance ; and fifthly, in each and all of these operations it gets the objective character of what it 'constructs' by unconsciously inferring it as the only possible cause of some sensation which it unconsciously feels.[183] Comment on this seems hardly called for. It is, as I said, pure mythology. None of these facts, then, appealed to so confidently in proof of the existence of ideas in an unconscious state, prove anything of the sort. They prove either that conscious ideas were present which the next instant were forgotten; or they prove that certain results, similar to results of reasoning, may be wrought out by rapid brain-processes to which no ideation seems attached. But there is one more argument to be alleged, less obviously insufficient than those which we have reviewed, and demanding a new sort of reply. Tenth Proof . There is a great class of experiences in our mental life which may be described as discoveries that a subjective condition which we have been having is really something different from what we had supposed. We suddenly find ourselves bored by a thing which we thought we were enjoying well enough; or in love with a person whom we imagined we only liked. Or else we deliberately analyze our motives, and find that at bottom they contain jealousies and cupidities which we little suspected to be there. Our feelings towards people are perfect wells of motivation, unconscious of itself, which introspection brings to light. And our sensations likewise: we constantly discover new elements in sensations which we have been in the habit of receiving all our days, elements, too, which have been there from the first, since otherwise we should have been unable to distinguish the sensations containing them from others nearly allied. The elements must exist, for we use them to discriminate by; but they must exist in an unconscious state, since we so completely fail to single them out.[184] The books of the analytic school of psychology abound in examples of the kind. Who knows the countless associations that mingle with his each and every thought? Who can pick apart all the nameless feelings that stream in at every moment from his various internal organs, muscles, heart, glands, lungs, etc., and compose in their totality his sense of bodily life? Who is aware of the part played by feelings of innervation and suggestions of possible muscular exertion in all his judgments of distance, shape, and size? Consider, too, the difference between a sensation which we simply have and one which we attend to .

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Prof. Lazarus [539] (from whom I borrow this quotation), thus explains both of these contrasted illusions by our principle of the awakened memories being multitudinous or few: "The circle of experiences, widely extended, rich in variety, which he had in view on the day of his leaving the village rises now in his mind as its image lies before him. And with it—in rapid succession and violent motion, not in chronologic order, or from chronologic motives, but suggesting each other by all sorts of connections—arise massive images of all his rich vagabondage and roving life. They roll and wave confusedly together, first perhaps one from the first year, then from the sixth, soon from the second, again from the fifth, the first, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, and he reels with the fulness of his vision. . . . Then the inner eye turns away from all this past. The outer one turns to the village, especially to the church-tower. The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, so that the consciousness is filled with that alone, or almost alone. The one vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so unchanged, that it seems as if only a week of time could have come between." The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older—that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same. "Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour." So writes Prof. Paul Janet, [540] and gives a solution which can hardly be said to diminish the mystery. There is a law, he says, by which the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life—a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Most of the most important things are still pending, my dear Wenzel; and now I'm back to it and my grandfather's intimate, you know, the good Jean Jacques Hoffstede, would wander about translating naughty little poems from French... but it couldn't go on like this all the time; a lot has changed and will still have to change more... We don't have 37,000 inhabitants anymore, but already over 50, as you know, and the character of the city is changing. There we have new buildings and the suburbs that are expanding and good roads and we can restore the monuments from our heyday. But in the end that's just superficial. Most of the most important things are still pending, my dear Wenzel; and now I'm back to it and my grandfather's intimate, you know, the good Jean Jacques Hoffstede, would wander about translating naughty little poems from French... but it couldn't go on like this all the time; a lot has changed and will still have to change more... We don't have 37,000 inhabitants anymore, but already over 50, as you know, and the character of the city is changing. There we have new buildings and the suburbs that are expanding and good roads and we can restore the monuments from our heyday. But in the end that's just superficial. Most of the most important things are still pending, my dear Wenzel; and now I'm back to it wandered around translating naughty little poems from French…but couldn't go on like this all the time; a lot has changed and will still have to change more... We don't have 37,000 inhabitants anymore, but already over 50, as you know, and the character of the city is changing. There we have new buildings and the suburbs that are expanding and good roads and we can restore the monuments from our heyday. But in the end that's just superficial. Most of the most important things are still pending, my dear Wenzel; and now I'm back to it wandered around translating naughty little poems from French…but couldn't go on like this all the time; a lot has changed and will still have to change more... We don't have 37,000 inhabitants anymore, but already over 50, as you know, and the character of the city is changing. There we have new buildings and the suburbs that are expanding and good roads and we can restore the monuments from our heyday. But in the end that's just superficial. Most of the most important things are still pending, my dear Wenzel; and now I'm back to it that expand and good roads and can restore the monuments of our heyday. But in the end that's just superficial. Most of the most important things are still pending, my dear Wenzel; and now I'm back to it that expand and good roads and can restore the monuments of our heyday. But in the end that's just superficial.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Jason came out and lay next to me and went on and on about what truth was, and did I think there was anybody out there. Jason had come to believe that truth was something imparted to you when you were high. Later he would go off to college. Friends of mine told me that he became known for waking up miles from campus, in his underwear, never knowing how he got there. On this night he was telling me about truth, about how it is something you know but you don’t know you are knowing it. He was saying the key to the meaning of life is probably on other planets. “Don. Don.” He tried to get my attention. “What, man?” I lay there, seasick. “They could live on that one, man.” “Who, Jason?” “Aliens, man.” As soon as one of the guys sobered up enough to drive, they took me home. I crawled through my bedroom window, stretched out on the floor, and waited for the ship to run aground. I wondered, in that moment, about the conviction I had felt so many years before, the conviction about my mother’s Christmas present. I figured all of this was God’s fault. I thought that if God would make it so I felt convicted all the time, I would never sin. I would never get drunk or smoke pot. I didn’t feel worldly wise that night, rolling over on my stomach trying to hold down the vomit. I didn’t feel like a guy after a tennis match at Wimbledon. I don’t guess Mr. Burkebile was all that happy when he was drunk and wrecking police cars either. If he was happy he probably wouldn’t have sobered up, and he probably wouldn’t have to attend all those meetings. I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the things we need. I wrote a children’s story about this idea, but it’s not really for children . . . [image "9780785263708_0077_001" file=Image00019.jpg] There once was a Rabbit named Don Rabbit. [image "9780785263708_0078_001" file=Image00020.jpg] Don Rabbit went to Stumptown Coffee every morning. [image "9780785263708_0079_001" file=Image00021.jpg] One Morning at Stumptown, Don Rabbit saw Sexy Carrot. [image "9780785263708_0080_001" file=Image00022.jpg] And Don Rabbit decided to chase Sexy Carrot. [image "9780785263708_0081_001" file=Image00023.jpg] But Sexy Carrot was very fast. [image "9780785263708_0082_001" file=Image00024.jpg] And Don Rabbit chased Sexy Carrot all over Oregon. [image "9780785263708_0083_001" file=Image00025.jpg] And all over America, all the way to New York City. [image "9780785263708_0084_001" file=Image00026.jpg] And Don Rabbit chased Sexy Carrot all the way to the Moon. [image "9780785263708_0085_001" file=Image00027.jpg] And Don Rabbit was very, very tired. [image "9780785263708_0086_001" file=Image00028.jpg] But with one last burst of strength, Don Rabbit lunged at Sexy Carrot. [image "9780785263708_0087_001" file=Image00029.jpg] And Don Rabbit caught Sexy Carrot. [image "9780785263708_0088_001" file=Image00030.jpg] And the moral of the story is that if you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Which is to say that our psychological vocabulary is wholly inadequate to name the differences that exist, even such strong differences as these. But namelessness is compatible with existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto cœlo other than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words. Again, what is the strange difference between an experience tasted for the first time and the same experience recognized as familiar, as having been enjoyed before, though we cannot name it or say where or when? A tune, an odor, a flavor sometimes carry this inarticulate feeling of their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that we are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. But strong and characteristic as this psychosis is—it probably is due to the submaximal excitement of wide-spreading associational brain-tracts—the only name we have for all its shadings is 'sense of familiarity.' When we read such phrases as 'naught but,' 'either one or the other,' 'a is b , but,' although it is, nevertheless,' 'it is an excluded middle, there is no tertium quid ,' and a host of other verbal skeletons of logical relation, is it true that there is nothing more in our minds than the words themselves as they pass? What then is the meaning of the words which we think we understand as we read? What makes that meaning different in one phrase from what it is in the other? 'Who?' 'When?' 'Where?' Is the difference of felt meaning in these interrogatives nothing more than their difference of sound? And is it not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it, though so impalpable to direct examination? Is not the same true of such negatives as 'no,' 'never,' 'not yet'? The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminate sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever. Sensorial images are stable psychic facts; we can hold them still and look at them as long as we like. These bare images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images to another.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  No wonder he can discover no 'hypothesis.' The unity of the parts of the stream is just as 'real' a connection as their diversity is a real separation; both connection and separation are ways in which the past thoughts appear to the present Thought;—unlike each other in respect of date and certain qualities—this is the separation; alike in other qualities, and continuous in time—this is the connection. In demanding a more 'real' connection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and continuity, Hume seeks 'the world behind the looking-glass,' and gives a striking example of that Absolutism which is the great disease of philosophic Thought. The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our 'stream' was adopted by all of his successors as a complete inventory of the facts. The associationist Philosophy was founded. Somehow, out of 'ideas,' each separate, each ignorant of its mates, but sticking together and calling each other up according to certain laws, all the higher forms of consciousness were to be explained, and among them the consciousness of our personal identity. The task was a hard one, in which what we called the psychologist's fallacy (p. 134 ff.) bore the brunt of the work. Two ideas, one of 'A,' succeeded by another of 'B,' were transmuted into a third idea of 'A after B .' An idea from last year returning now was taken to be an idea of last year ; two similar ideas stood for an idea of similarity , and the like; palpable confusions, in which certain facts about the ideas, possible only to an outside knower of them, were put into the place of the ideas' own proper and limited deliverance and content. Out of such recurrences and resemblances in a series of discrete ideas and feelings a knowledge was somehow supposed to be engendered in each feeling that it was recurrent and resembling, and that it helped to form a series to whose unity the name I came to be joined. In the same way, substantially, Herbart,[277] in Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would fuse into a manner of representing itself for which I was the consecrated name.[278] The defect of all these attempts is that the conclusion pretended to follow from certain premises is by no means rationally involved in the premises. A feeling of any kind, if it simply returns , ought to be nothing else than what it was at first. If memory of previous existence and all sorts of other cognitive functions are attributed to it when it returns, it is no longer the same, but a wholly different feeling, and ought to be so described. We have so described it with the greatest explicitness. We have said that feelings never do return.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The meanings of words which in childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult life to be immediately present."[588] These are cases where too many paths, leading to too diverse associates, block each other's way, and all that the mind gets along with its object is a fringe of felt familiarity or sense that there are associates. A similar result comes about when a definite setting is only nascently aroused. We then feel that we have seen the object already, but when or where we cannot say, though we may seem to ourselves to be on the brink of saying it. That nascent cerebral excitations can effect consciousness with a sort of sense of the imminence of that which stronger excitations would make us definitely feel, is obvious from what happens when we seek to remember a name. It tingles, it trembles on the verge, but does not come. Just such a tingling and trembling of unrecovered associates is the penumbra of recognition that may surround any experience and make it seem familiar, though we know not why.[589] There is a curious experience which everyone seems to have had—the feeling that the present moment in its completeness has been experienced before—we were saying just this thing, in just this place, to just these people, etc. This 'sense of pre-existence' has been treated as a great mystery and occasioned much speculation. Dr. Wigan considered it due to a dissociation of the action of the two hemispheres, one of them becoming conscious a little later than the other, but both of the same fact.[590] I must confess that the quality of mystery seems to me a little strained. I have over and over again in my own case succeeded in resolving the phenomenon into a case of memory, so indistinct that whilst some past circumstances are presented again, the others are not. The dissimilar portions of the past do not arise completely enough at first for the date to be identified. All we get is the present scene with a general suggestion of pastness about it. That faithful observer, Prof. Lazarus, interprets the phenomenon the same way;[591] and it is noteworthy that just as soon as the past context grows complete and distinct the emotion of weirdness fades from the experience. EXACT MEASUREMENTS OF MEMORY have recently been made in Germany. Professor Ebbinghaus, in a really heroic series of daily observations of more than two years' duration, examined the powers of retention and reproduction.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. One will say, As at the breaking out of great conflagrations, great darkness is at the first caused by the smoke, so when the world shall be consumed by fire, which shall be kindled, even the great luminaries shall be darkened; and when the light of the stars is decayed, the rest of their substance, incapable of exaltation, shall fall from heaven into what it was, when it was first raised aloft by the light. When this shall have taken place, it follows that the rational heavenly powers shall suffer dismay and derangement, and shall be suspended from their functions. And then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, that sign by which the heavenly things were made, that is, the power which the Son wrought when He hung upon the cross. And the sign shall appear in heaven, that men of all tribes who before had not believed Christianity when preached, then by that sign, acknowledging it as made plain, shall grieve and mourn for their ignorance and sins. Others will think otherwise, that as the light of a lamp dies away by degrees, so when the supply of the heavenly luminaries shall fail, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon and the light of the stars shall grow dim, and that which in their composition is earthy shall fall from heaven. But how can it be said of the sun that its light shall be darkened, when Esaias the Prophet (Is. 30:26.) declares, that in the end of the world, there shall be light proceeding forth from the sun? And of the moon he declares that it shall be as the sun. But concerning the stars, there are some that endeavour to convince us that all, or many of them, are larger than the whole earth. How then shall they fall from heaven, when this earth would not be large enough to contain them? JEROME. These things, therefore, shall not come to pass by any diminution of light, for in another place we read that the light of the sun shall be sevenfold; but by comparison with real light, all things shall seem dim.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Wherever it is lodged it must be 'synthetized' when it comes to be thought. And that particular way of lodging it will be the better, which, in addition to describing the facts naturally, makes the 'mystery of synthesis' least hard to understand. Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological. The notion of our thought being this sort of an elaborate internal machine-shop stands condemned by all we said in favor of its simplicity on pages 183 ff. Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it to be reduced to order. There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-burly in her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at all, the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former member of the couple of related terms. The parts and the relations surely belong less to the knower than to what is known. But even were all the mythology true, the process of synthesis would in no whit be explained by calling the inside of the mind its seat. No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much a puzzle how the 'Ego' can employ the productive Imagination to make the Understanding use the categories to combine the data which Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intuition, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts. Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same: the Many known by the One . Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—what you like—it must know . The best grammatical subject for the verb know would, if possible, be one from whose other properties the knowing could be deduced. And if there be no such subject, the best one would be that with the fewest ambiguities and the least pretentious name. By Kant's confession, the transcendental Ego has no properties, and from it nothing can be deduced. Its name is pretentious, and, as we shall presently see, has its meaning ambiguously mixed up with that of the substantial soul.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The meanings of words which in childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult life to be immediately present." [588] These are cases where too many paths, leading to too diverse associates, block each other's way, and all that the mind gets along with its object is a fringe of felt familiarity or sense that there are associates. A similar result comes about when a definite setting is only nascently aroused. We then feel that we have seen the object already, but when or where we cannot say, though we may seem to ourselves to be on the brink of saying it. That nascent cerebral excitations can effect consciousness with a sort of sense of the imminence of that which stronger excitations would make us definitely feel, is obvious from what happens when we seek to remember a name. It tingles, it trembles on the verge, but does not come. Just such a tingling and trembling of unrecovered associates is the penumbra of recognition that may surround any experience and make it seem familiar, though we know not why. [589] There is a curious experience which everyone seems to have had—the feeling that the present moment in its completeness has been experienced before—we were saying just this thing, in just this place, to just these people, etc. This 'sense of pre-existence' has been treated as a great mystery and occasioned much speculation. Dr. Wigan considered it due to a dissociation of the action of the two hemispheres, one of them becoming conscious a little later than the other, but both of the same fact. [590] I must confess that the quality of mystery seems to me a little strained. I have over and over again in my own case succeeded in resolving the phenomenon into a case of memory, so indistinct that whilst some past circumstances are presented again, the others are not. The dissimilar portions of the past do not arise completely enough at first for the date to be identified. All we get is the present scene with a general suggestion of pastness about it. That faithful observer, Prof. Lazarus, interprets the phenomenon the same way; [591] and it is noteworthy that just as soon as the past context grows complete and distinct the emotion of weirdness fades from the experience. EXACT MEASUREMENTS OF MEMORY have recently been made in Germany. Professor Ebbinghaus, in a really heroic series of daily observations of more than two years' duration, examined the powers of retention and reproduction.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 112 < Lecture 16  Imperial Persecution of the Early Christians `In sum, Pliny’s ad hoc procedure was to consider Christians punishable simply for being Christian, executing them if they refused to recant but acquitting them if they did and could prove it. This appears to have set a precedent for other governors from that time onward. Later officials acted in similar ways. `We have transcripts of court trials in which governors try desperately to get recalcitrant Christians to recant their faith and return to pagan ways. In these cases, the Christians regularly refuse, to the real consternation and puzzlement of the ruling authority. But he invariably carries out his duty and, even against his will, orders them executed. An example is the Martyrdom of Polycarp. `This kind of persecution did not happen everywhere or frequently. But it happened in some times and places. It was not until the middle of the 3rd century that the attacks against Christians became more focused, sustained, and empire-wide. By that time, Christianity was truly starting to grow. Reading Cobb, Divine Deliverance. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, chapter 7. Moss, The Myth of Persecution. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Question ̧What do the persecutions by the emperor Nero and by Pliny the Younger tell us about why Christians aroused opposition in the Roman world? < 113 < TABLE OF CONTENTS Lecture 17 Early Christian Early Christian ApologistsApologists T his lecture looks at why Christians proved so unpopular to the world at large, how they came to be verbally attacked by their opponents, and how they responded in rhetorical self-defense. It was in the middle of the 2nd century that Christian intellectuals started writing defenses of their faith, arguing against the widespread perceptions held about them among the Roman populace at large. The term for this type of activity is apology, a word that has taken on different connotations in modern English but at the time just meant “defense.” Why the Apologies Appeared `It is easy to understand why Christian literary apologies began to appear in the middle of the 2nd century. Christians increasingly faced outsider attacks, not only in the form of actual persecution but also in the arena of public opinion. Rumors were f lying around about their peculiar views, nontraditional practices, and secret meetings. `We have some intriguing indications of how pagans viewed Christians in the 2nd and early 3rd centuries. Christians were widely thought to be dangerous to the well-being of society for two reasons that will sound quite surprising to modern ears. yThey were thought to be atheists.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  (i) They describe the mental condition of a man ‘who cannot see the lesson that events are designed to teach him’. In Mark 6.52 the disciples were bewildered when Jesus came to them walking on the water because they did not see the meaning of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, because their hearts were ‘hardened’ (pepōrōmenē). When they were crossing the lake, they were worried about the fact that they had forgotten to bring bread with them. This episode in Mark follows the feeding of the four thousand; and Jesus asked them why they were so worried about having no bread. ‘Have you your hearts yet hardened?’ He asks (pepōrōmeriē) (Mark 8.17). The word here describes the blind insensitiveness which will not learn a lesson. We sometimes say that things make no ‘impression’ on a person. Now there were certain Greek thinkers who believed that things did literally make an ‘impression’ on the mind. It was as if words and sights and ideas impinged on the soft, wax-like substance of the mind, and literally left an ‘impression’. But clearly if the mind becomes hardened there can be no such thing as an ‘impression’ on it. Here the word describes unteachability. It describes the man who is so wrapped up in his own little world that nothing from any other world can touch him, the man whose mind is shut to all ideas but his own, the man who is impervious to the lessons that events are designed to teach him. (ii) They describe the mental condition of the man ‘who has made himself incapable of seeing the meaning of God’s word for him’. Paul says of the Jews that their minds are ‘blinded’ when they hear the word of God read to them (II Cor. 3.14). A man can lose any faculty if he will not use it. Darwin lamented the fact that he had lost the power to appreciate music and poetry, because he had given all his time to biology. He said that if he had life to live over again he would keep that faculty of appreciation alive. If a man erects his ideas into supreme authority for long enough he will in the end be incapable of receiving the ideas of God. (iii) They describe ‘the attitude of the Jews’ to God. In spite of the miracles they did not believe in Jesus because God had blinded their eyes and ‘hardened’ their hearts (John 12.40). These are the words that Paul twice uses to describe what had been happening to Israel throughout all her history (Rom. 11.7, 25). They describe the man who stubbornly takes his own way, who is deaf to the appeal of God, because he has been busy making God in his own image. They describe the man who thinks he knows better than God.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  And my purpose is this —to make of you a perfect work, secure against restraint, compulsion and hindrance, free, prosperous, happy, looking to (aphoran) God in everything both great and small.’ He describes the great hero and benefactor Hercules as ‘looking to’ (aphoran) Zeus is everything he did. Josephus, describing the death of Aaron, tells how, as he died, the crowd ‘looked wonderingly’ (aphoran) upon him. From all this there emerges a wonderful picture of the way in which the true Christian looks at the blessedness of God and the wonder of Jesus Christ. He looks with an utter fixity of concentration; he looks with wondering amazement; he looks as one who looks to a champion and a saviour; he looks as one who looks at the master plan and pattern of life; he looks as a loved one looks with adoration at his lover; he looks as a man looks at his familiar friend; he looks as a man looks to God when God has become for him the only reality in the world. Aphoran and apoblepein describe the look of the soul which is ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’. There is another NT word which implies a fixity of gaze. It is the word atenizein, which means ‘to gaze intently at’. It is a favourite word of Luke. It occurs fourteen times in the NT; of these fourteen instances two are in II Cor. (3.7, 13), two are in the Gospel according to St Luke, and the remaining ten are in Acts. It is used of the people in the Synagogue of Nazareth gazing with intent bewilderment at Jesus (Luke 4.20). It is used of the close scrutiny of the servant in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house when Peter was recognized (Luke 22.56). It is used of the disciples gazing after Jesus when the ascension had taken place (Acts 1.10). It is used of Peter’s and John’s gaze at the lame man at the Temple gate (Acts 3.4), and of the astonished gaze of the people at them after the miracle had taken place (Acts 3.12). It is used of the Sanhedrin gazing at Stephen as he spoke with eloquence and debated with power (Acts 6.15) and of Stephen’s own gaze up into heaven as he died beneath the stones of the mob (Acts 7.55). It is used of Peter’s astonished gaze at the angel who warned him of the coming of Cornelius (Acts 10.4), and of his gaze at the vision of the creatures on the sheet (Acts 11.6). It is used of Paul’s penetrating look at Elymas, the hostile sorcerer (Acts 13.9). It is used of the look of dawning hope in the eyes of the lame man at Lystra (Acts 14.9). It is used of Paul’s piercing look at the Sanhedrin (Acts 23.1).

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  In the papyri the word is used of the kind of stone that is used to pack the foundation course of a building. Medically the words have certain technical uses. Pōros means the chalk stone that forms in the joints and paralyses action. It also means a stone in the bladder; and pōrōsis means the process by which a callus forms at the joining of the break when fractured bones unite. Pōrōsis does not mean a callus on the skin, as, for instance, a callus formed on the hand by digging; the Greek for that is tule, which is not a NT word. Pōrōsis is the much harder and much more irremovable bone callus that forms when a fracture unites. In all these cases it is easy to see that the basic meaning of the word is an impenetrable hardness, a hardness like bone or even marble. The words then acquire two different sets of meanings. (i) They are used in connexion with something which has ‘lost all power of sensation’. Athenaeus has a queer story of Dionysius of Heracles. He became overfat from over-eating. He became subject to fits of coma. His surgeons could only arouse him by pricking him with long needles. And even then certain parts of his body had lost all power of feeling because the fat had lost its sense of feeling. It had become pepōrōmenē, which is the perfect participle passive of the verb pōroun. The words have now become definitely connected with ‘loss of feeling’. (ii) The words become connected with the idea of ‘blindness’ and ‘inability to see’. The word pōroun is the only one of the group which occurs in the Septuagint, and it only occurs once, in Job 17.7 where the AV has it: ‘Mine eyes have grown dim by reason of sorrow.’ So then we may say that at the back of them this group of words has three ideas—the idea of ‘hardness’, the idea of ‘lack of the power to feel’, and the idea of ‘blindness’, lack of the power to see. With this background in our minds we turn to the NT. Pōroun and pōrōsis together occur eight times in the NT. (i) They describe the mental condition of a man ‘who cannot see the lesson that events are designed to teach him’. In Mark 6.52 the disciples were bewildered when Jesus came to them walking on the water because they did not see the meaning of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, because their hearts were ‘hardened’ (pepōrōmenē). When they were crossing the lake, they were worried about the fact that they had forgotten to bring bread with them.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 57 < Lecture 8  The Conversion of Paul `Paul did not know Jesus personally. He was raised in a different part of the Mediterranean. That was outside of Israel, probably in a Jewish community in a major urban area, possibly in what is now southeastern Turkey. His native language was Greek, not Aramaic. `Evidence indicates that Paul became a follower of Jesus only after he had been an unusually ardent opponent of the faith. It appears that at first, he considered the very central claim of Jesus’s followers completely ludicrous: the idea that a man crucified by his enemies was God’s powerful messiah. yFor most Jews, as this was just the opposite of what was supposed to happen to the messiah. yHe was supposed to destroy his enemies, not be tortured to death by them. `Then there occurred a complete turnaround that altered the course of history. From the time frame that Paul himself sets out in his letters, it appears his conversion must have occurred something like three years after the death of Jesus. yHe situates the event around Damascus in the context of his persecuting Christians. In one place, he says that he had a revelation: “God revealed his Son to me” (Galatians 1:16). yIn other places, he says that he saw Jesus alive. Examples include the phrases “Christ appeared to me” (from 1 Corinthians 15:8) and “I have seen the Lord” (from 1 Corinthians 9:1). yThese references are apparently to the same event. `Paul concluded that Jesus was alive, even though he knew full well Jesus had been executed several years earlier. As an apocalyptic Jew, Paul could only draw one conclusion: If Jesus was dead but now was alive, God must have raised him from the dead. `Once Paul thought that, he completely changed his mind about a number of things, in highly significant ways. He did not stop being an apocalyptic Jew, but there are four big ways Paul’s views changed.