HKB
faculties. And we still have in the rear the further problem of how these abstract entities stand to the real and concrete single acts and states of soul and mind.
This hypostatising of faculties, and this distinction of the “Substantial” soul from its “accidentia” or phenomena, had grown—through the materialistic proclivities of popular conception—from the indications found in Aristotle. It attained its climax, perhaps in the Wolffian school in Germany, but it has been the resort of superficial psychology in all ages. For while it, on one hand, seemed to save the substantial Soul on whose incorruptibility great issues were believed to hinge, it held out, on the other, an open hand to the experimental inquirer, whom it bade freely to search amongst the phenomena. But if it was the refuge of pusillanimity, it was also the perpetual object of censure from all the greater and bolder spirits. Thus, the psychology of Hobbes may be hasty and crude, but it is at least animated by a belief that the mental life is continuous, and not cut off by abrupt divisions severing the mental faculties. The “image” (according to his materialistically coloured psychology) which, when it is a strong motion, is called sense, passes, as it becomes weaker or decays, into imagination, and gives rise, by its various complications and associations with others, to reminiscence, experience, expectation. Similarly, the voluntary motion which is an effect or a phase of imagination, beginning at first in small motions—called by themselves “endeavours,” and in relation to their cause “appetites” or “desires(37)”—leads on cumulatively to Will, which is the “last appetite in deliberating.” Spinoza, his contemporary, speaks in the same strain(38). “Faculties of intellect, desire, love, &c., are either utterly fictitious, or nothing but metaphysical entities, or universals which we are in the habit of forming from particulars. Will and intellect are thus supposed to stand to this or that idea, this or that volition, in the same way as stoniness to this or that stone, or as man to Peter or Paul.” They are supposed to be a general something which gets defined and detached. But, in the mind, or in the cogitant soul, there are no such things. There are only ideas: and by an “idea” we are to understand not an image on the retina or in the brain, not a “dumb something, like a painting on a panel(39),” but a mode of thinking, or even the act of intellection itself. The ideas are the mind: mind does not have ideas. Further, every “idea,” as such, “involves affirmation or negation,”—is not an image, but an act of judgment—contains, as we should say, an implicit reference to actuality,—a reference which in volition is made explicit. Thus (concludes the corollary of Eth. ii. 49) “Will and Intellect are one and the same.” But in any case the “faculties” as such are no better than entia rationis (i.e. auxiliary modes of representing facts).