The Divine Lamp

Chapter 1

Article 1 Nature of Man: His mental Faculties: Senses and Intellect.

Since Logic deals with thought and thought is a product of the mind, we cannot better approach our subject than by taking a general glance at the nature of the mind and the way in which it acquires knowledge. There is a special ranch of philosophy which investigates all our mental activities: it is called Psychology. We will here take over from psychology, without any detailed analysis or discussion, those of its conclusions which will help throw light upon the subject-matter of logic proper. The mutual bearings of logic and psychology will be explained further on (#20). It is man himself, who by his own thought, furnishes the subject-mater of logic. Now man is corporeal being, existing in space and time like all other corporeal or material things, and, like them too, endowed with many mechanical, physical, and chemical properties and powers; but he is also animate or living, i.e., organically constituted in his material structure, and endowed with life in common with the things of the vegetable or plant world; and he is sentient also, capable of sense perceptions and sense desires, in common with the beings of the animal world; finally he is rational, that is to say, possessed of a characteristic aptitude peculiar to himself and entitling him to a place apart in God’s visible creation, the faculty of reason or intelligence (46). Such is man’s composite nature; and this nature is the remote principle or source of all his activities, rational, sentient, vegetative, and non-vital, all alike.

The proximate principles or sources of his various activities are called faculties. To what faculty do his acts of thought belong, and y what features are we to recognize them? Well, even the very highest and noblest thoughts of man reveal the compositeness of his nature. They spring from his reason or intelligence, of course, but no single thought of his is an act of the reason or intellect pure and simple. All his intellectual acts are dependent both in their origin and in their actual exercise, on the antecedent and concomitant activity of other cognitive faculties of the lower sense order, faculties which man possesses in common with animals, faculties which act only in and through some bodily organ. Of those faculties of sense knowledge or sense cognition, as they are called, some are known as external senses, and others as internal senses. The external senses-of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling or touching-are our channels of information about the outer world. The internal senses- of imagination, sense memory, and sense consciousness-recall or reproduce in our minds, and modify in many ways, the experiences of our external senses. All those sense faculties, external and internal, subserve and minister to the faculty of thought proper-the reason, intelligence, intellect, understanding, as it is variously called. I cannot think of a thing unless some of these senses has already perceived it. Nor can i continue to think of it unless some of them continues to assist me. If I want to recall it to my mind I must conjure up some sort of image of it: a natural image; or an outline or scheme or formula, such as the mathematicians forms in geometry; or an imaginary model or design, such as the artist constructs in his imagination to help him in the conception and execution of his work. All this deserves a little reflection.

Next installment: Distinction Between Sense Perception And Intellectual Conception: Dependence Of Intellectual Thought Upon The Sense Faculties.