Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

Edinburgh and London

John Bell, and G.G.J. & J. Robinson

1785

"Aristotle taught, that all the objects of our thought enter at first by the senses; and, since the sense cannot receive external material objects themselves, it receives their species; that is, their images or forms, without the matter; as wax receives the form of the seal without any of the matter of it."

Aristotle taught, that all the objects of our thought enter at first by the senses; and, since the sense cannot receive external material objects themselves, it receives their species; that is, their images or forms, without the matter; as wax receives the form of the seal without any of the matter of it. These images or forms, impressed upon the senses, are called sensible species and are the objects only of the sensitive part of the mind: But, by various internal powers, they are retained, refined, and spiritualized, so as to become objects of memory and imagination, and, at last, of pure intellection. When they are objects of memory and of imagination, they get the name of phantasms. When, by farther refinement, and being stripped of their particularities, they become objects of science; they are called intelligible species: So that every immediate object, whether of sense, of memory, of imagination, or of reasoning, must be some phantasm or species in the mind itself.
(I.i.10, 25)

Uncategorized::Wax and Seal Impressions::Imprinting Uncategorized::Images

Reading in Google Books

4 entries in ESTC (1785, 1786, 1790, 1793).

See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh and London: Printed for John Bell, and G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1785). <Link to Google Books>

01/31/2012