Lewis, Edwin Herbert (1866-1938)

Some Definitions of Individualism [from The American Journal of Sociology]

1911

"Sensations rain in on you as in a dream, but you suppress all but what are useful for your conscious purpose."

Hume's atomism is now discarded, and in its place we have an immediate individualism. The fashionable name just now for this immediate individuality is "consciousness." It means being awake. You are most truly indivisible when most awake. Sleep scatters you; sensations come storming along into the dreamer's mind, and he is a prey to each in turn. Once thoroughly aroused, you "pull yourself together." You get "self-control." You become conscious, that is, grasping masses of organized thought and handling them together. You are no longer the slave of those successive atoms into which sleep divides you. Sensations rain in on you as in a dream, but you suppress all but what are useful for your conscious purpose. You get absorbed in that purpose, and seem to triumph over time. You grip things in your attention and enjoy a second of eternity. Of course time gets you again, and what you say after ten at night is sensational and incoherent, and then you drop off into unconsciousness. To be awake is to be dead to the irrelevant; to be asleep is to be at the mercy of the irrelevant. The psychologists are working hard with this paradoxical and evasive "consciousness." Sooner or later they will be compelled to establish some unit of it, some criterion of its presence, and then they will give you their notion of just when an animal attains consciousness, or just when a baby wakes up, or just when you and I know what we are about. Success to them. The sooner they get their unit, the better. Whatever it is, it will have to be changed, but they can't work accurately without some criterion.
(pp. 240-1)

Weather::Rain

Reading

Edwin Herbert Lewis,"Some Definitions of Individualism" The American Journal of Sociology 17:2 (1911): 223-253. <Link to Google Books>

04/26/2011