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When we come to images or memories or thoughts, speculation, while always closely related to practice, is more explicit, and it is in fact not immediately obvious that such processes can be described in any sense as practical.

Samuel Alexander

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Samuel Alexander
Age: 79 †
Born: 1859
Born: January 6
Died: 1938
Died: September 13
Philosopher
University Teacher
Sydney
NSW
Always
Thoughts
Described
Memories
Closely
Practice
Practicals
Fact
Practical
Process
Immediately
Sense
Images
Explicit
Facts
Related
Speculation
Come
Obvious
Processes

More quotes by Samuel Alexander

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But unfortunately Locke treated ideas of reflection as if they were another class of objects of contemplation beside ideas of sensation.
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... when demand is being destroyed by expensive oil just as expensive oil is incentivising increased production - it should come as no surprise that at some point the markets would react.
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The sensory acts are accordingly distinguished by their objects.
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Such being the nature of mental life, the business of psychology is primarily to describe in detail the various forms which attention or conation assumes upon the different levels of that life.
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But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value.
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Thus the same object may supply a practical perception to one person and a speculative one to another, or the same person may perceive it partly practically and partly speculatively.
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The mental act of sensation which issues in reflex movement is so simple as to defy analysis.
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You can mark in desire the rising of the tide, as the appetite more and more invades the personality, appealing, as it does, not merely to the sensory side of the self, but to its ideal components as well.
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We cannot therefore say that mental acts contain a cognitive as well as a conative element.
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Curiosity begins as an act of tearing to pieces or analysis.
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The perceptive act is a reaction of the mind upon the object of which it is the perception.
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It is convenient to distinguish the two kinds of experience which have thus been described, the experienc-ing and the experienc-ed, by technical words.
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Psychology is the science of the act of experiencing, and deals with the whole system of such acts as they make up mental life.
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For psychological purposes the most important differences in conation are those in virtue of which the object is revealed as sensed or perceived or imaged or remembered or thought.
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An expectation is a future object, recognised as belonging to me.
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Hence, in desiring, the more the enjoyment is delayed, the more fancy begins to weave about the object images of future fruition, and to clothe the desired object with properties calculated to inflame the impulse.
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In the perception of a tree we can distinguish the act of experiencing, or perceiving, from the thing experienced, or perceived.
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Desire then is the invasion of the whole self by the wish, which, as it invades, sets going more and more of the psychical processes but at the same time, so long as it remains desire, does not succeed in getting possession of the self.
Samuel Alexander