Archives - Consciousness: Page 14
Author: paul carson (Sat Jul 29, 2006 5:10 pm)
Title: consciousness
There is no term (consciousness) at once so popular and so devoid of standard meaning. How can a term mean anything when it is employed to connote anything and everything, including its own negation? One hears of the object of consciousness and the subject of consciousness, and the union of the two in self-consciousness; of the private consciousness, the social consciousness, and the transcendental consciousness; the inner and the outer, the higher and the lower, the temporal and the eternal consciousness; the activity and the state of consciousness. Then there is consciousness-stuff, and unconsciousness consciousness …, and unconscious physical states or subconsciousness … The list is not complete, but sufficiently amazing. Consciousness comprises everything that is, and indefinitely much more. It is small wonder that the definition of it is little attempted.
The psychologist Ralph Barton Perry, 1904.
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