The Mental Highway
	Elements Of Consciousness <  Previous Contents Next  >

All states of consciousness contain the same elements. The difference in the quality of these states arises from the quantity of one element of consciousness, for instance the elements of thinking occupy a larger place than those of feeling. Knowing the elements and their combinations that make up the various states of consciousness is vital. We may isolate and analyze any single experience to learn just what factors of the mind are most prominent.

The generally accepted classifications are cognition, feeling, and will. Cognition includes sensations, representations, and thoughts. Will includes impulse, purpose, and resolve. The two denote the conscious sides of life, which we turn toward the outer world. Cognition enables us to form an image of the external world and of ourselves as a part of it, while Will enables us to react on that world.

Feeling is the side that faces the inner and unseen factors of experience. It cannot become an element of a percept or image. Feeling may rise to become an inner illumination on the stream of ideas and sensations. The feeling elements, as contrasted with the other conscious elements, act independently. For instance, feeling does not necessarily accompany any definite condition.

In the maturity of a normal life, cognition and will assert themselves to balance feeling, but activity is free from feeling. Neither is cognition separate from will. The rule is that the fewer elements of cognition and will, the more feeling, sensation and passion.

A state of life where the struggle for existence is not immediate is the only condition under which a definite distinction between the various elements of consciousness is possible. The psychological elements are not isolated, since we must react perpetually and instantaneously upon the external world, where our position in the universe determines our life, and where we must bring our surroundings into harmony with ourselves, or ourselves with them. Science and art do not develop, and the shady sides of consciousness, such as depression and sentimentality do not appear. In the "simple life" people are not "nervous."

A certain mood or feeling always accompanies thought. Activity of thought does not exist apart from feeling.

Knowledge becomes a power in the mind because of this feeling. A form of feeling, beyond the immediate control of cognition and will, is present in the passions associated with self preservation and the propagation of the race. Yet usually all memory and synthesis reveal activity, just as in the use of the eye, we must will to see if we would see aright.

An analysis of the lower life forms shows the primitive consciousness embraces not only feelings of pleasure and pain, but also motor-sensations by which these lead to movement, as in the Monera which expands for food purposes and contracts for defense. Others show the power to apprehend the difference between the stimulus of that which is food and that which is non-food.

A fundamental frame of mind, called the vital feeling, is the result of the general state of the organism as influenced by the normal or abnormal consciousness of the vital processes. It is an obscure mood of whose causes we are not at once conscious, for we are not always able to localize the stimuli that produce the feeling.

In some forms of heart disease and some mental diseases that produce disquiet and melancholy, the sufferer does not discover the causes of these frames of mind. Obscure impulses and vague desires arise at puberty the menopause, yet it is all beyond his comprehension.

We see the close relation between feeling and will in the fact that only a strong and lively feeling serves as a motive to the will. Cognitive elements do not in themselves lead to action. Both feeling and will are necessary.

We may take action with little or no apparent feeling back of the movement itself. So some movements arise out of Feeling, as in the heart, lungs, alimentary tract, and vascular system. Even the muscles and organs, usually under the control of the will, may be set in motion by strong emotion. Some of our involuntary movements, as shrinking from an attack, striking in anger, or reaching out the arms in sympathy, are probably involuntary emotional movements that were once purposive voluntary movements.

The law of the persistence of energy causes the contrast between the elements of consciousness. The more energy an individual spends on one form of reaction the less he can spend on another. He who expresses greatest emotion has least energy for action, since the voluntary control decreases as the involuntary action increases. Instinct is the primitive form of consciousness, and in this, the element of will is evidently the strongest.