Borderland of psychical research Author:James Hervey Hyslop Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III INTEKPBETING AND ASSOCIATING FUNCTIONS OF THE Our sensations are not the whole of our mental phenomena. They, our sensations, are the event... more »s that occur to us without our direct voluntary effort, and seem to be the effects of something not ourselves. Whether they mean anything more than themselves is the question to be discussed in the present chapter, but they are certainly that type of occurrence or experience which enlists our curiosity and interest most distinctly. They seem to demand some explanation of their occurrence, especially in that they are extremely numerous and variable in each sense-organism, though we do not rely upon this explanation as a measure of their practical value for immediate conduct. They are conceded to be events which do not explain themselves, whether we adopt the realistic or the idealistic theory of their meaning, the one seeking their sole cause outside the subject, and the other partly in the actions or reactions of the subject. In this conception of a cause for them they seem to imply something other than themselves, and, as they represent but one class of mental phenomena instead of the sole type of them, we have to examine the complementary functions of mind that can look at these sensations and assign them a meaning. I do not hererefer to self-consciousness and its numerous data, as they are not of interest in our present problem, though they are important in the final discussion of philosophic questions: but I refer to those mental acts or processes which apply alike to sensations and reflections, as the various states of consciousness may be called. These functions I shall call judgment, thus dividing the material of the present problem into Sensations and Judgments, and so reduce the fundamental processes of the mind t...« less