Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)

Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

Edinburgh and London

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

1785

"Because bodies are affected only by contact and pressure, we are apt to conceive, that what is an immediate object of thought, and affects the mind, must be in contact with it, and make some impression upon it."

There is no subject in which men have always been so prone to form their notions by analogies of this kind, as in what relates to the mind. We form an early acquaintance with material things by means of our senses, and are bred up in a constant familiarity with them. Hence we are apt to measure all things by them; and to ascribe to things most remote from matter, the qualities that belong to material things. It is for this reason, that mankind have, in all ages, been so prone to conceive the mind itself to be some subtile kind of matter: That they have been disposed to ascribe human figure, and human organs, not only to angels, but even to the Deity. Though we are conscious of the operations of our own minds when they are exerted, and are capable of attending to them, so as to form a distinct notion of them; this is so difficult a work to men, whose attention is constantly solicited by external objects, that we give them names from things that are familiar, and which are conceived to have some similitude to them; and the notions we form of them are no less analogical than the names we give them. Almost all the words, by which we express the operations of the mind, are borrowed from material objects. To understand, to conceive, to imagine, to comprehend, to deliberate, to infer, and many others, are words of this kind; so that the very language of mankind, with regard to the operations of our minds, is analogical. Because bodies are affected only by contact and pressure, we are apt to conceive, that what is an immediate object of thought, and affects the mind, must be in contact with it, and make some impression upon it. When we imagine any thing, the very word leads us to think that these must be some image in the mind of the thing conceived. It is evident, that these notions are drawn from some similitude conceived between body and mind, and between the properties of body and the operations of mind.
(I.iv, p. 54-5)

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Reading

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>

03/01/2012