Inner Cog

CHAPTER THREE: OF THE CONSEQUENCE (TRAIN) OF IMAGINATIONS

This is what I’m calling “consequence” or “train” of thoughts: the succession of thoughts from one to another. Another term is Mental Discourse, a different discourse from a discourse of words.

Suppose a person thinks on anything at all. The next thought this person has isn’t such a casual affair. Any possible thought isn’t going to randomly show up after a particular thought. We just saw that we have no imagination without the impression of sense, either wholly or in part. It’s also true that we don’t have a transition from one imagination to another, without a comparable transition to be found previously in our experienced sense.

This is why: all fancies (imaginations) are motions inside us, relics of those previous motions experienced directly (sense). As motion follows motion in sense, they remain connected after sense. If the first impression upon sense returns again and dominates sense, we expect that the second will follow again. The cohesion of these impressions is like a small drop of water that can be moved along a table by a person’s fingertip – no drop of water remains behind; it all flows together. This isn’t always the case in sense – sometimes the first impression is followed by the second, sometimes by another altogether. This leads to an uncertainty what we shall imagine next, but it remains certain that the next imagination will be a transition observed before, at one time or other.

There are two types of mental discourse. The first is unguided, without design, and random. Here there is no passionate thought that would govern and direct the thoughts that follow to a specific goal or desire. The thoughts are wandering, and seem irrelevant to each other, like a dream. A person without company frequently has a train of thoughts like this, and so does a person without any problems in the world. Their thoughts are just as busy as anyone else’s, but there is no harmony, like someone playing an out-of-tune lute, or better yet, someone unpracticed playing a tuned lute. Even so, you can sometimes catch the drift of thoughts, and how they are dependant on each other. In a recent essay on the present civil war, a random statement was made: “What was the value of a Roman penny?” Yet I saw the coherence of thought – thinking about the war led to the thought of giving the King up to his enemies, that thought flows to the betrayal of Christ, and from there to the 30 pence price of that treason, and so easily comes that malicious question. All of this happened in a moment of time, because thought is quick.

The second type of mental discourse is more constant, for it is regulated by some desire and design. Anything we desire or fear makes a strong and permanent impression upon us, and if distracted from it, we find it comes back quickly, even to the point of disturbing our sleep. Desire causes us to think of some plan we have seen that can produce the goal we seek. That thought makes us consider a plan to access that plan, and so on, until we come to a place that we ourselves can begin. The desired goal is so powerful that if our thoughts wander, they quickly return to the way. One of the seven wise men observed this, and so gave us this old worn-out saying: Respice finem (Look to the end). In other words, in everything you do, keep your eyes on what you would have, that powerful impression that will guide your thoughts in the way to attain it.

There are two types of regulated thought sequences. One, we see a desired effect and search for the causes to produce it (this is common to both humans and animals). Two, as we consider any possible thought whatsoever, we also look at all the possible effects that can be produced by this thought – we imagine what we can do with it once we have it. I have only ever seen this ability in people. It’s not fundamental to the nature of any other living creature with only sensual passions like hunger, thirst, lust, and anger. In short, the mind’s discourse, when governed by design, is nothing but seeking – it is that faculty called Invention. The Latins use the words sagacitias and solertis for this: a hunt for either the causes of some effect, past or present, or the effects of some past or present cause. For example, a person searches for something lost. The mind starts from the place where the thing was missed, and searches backwards and forwards, from place to place, from time to time, to find the last place it was present, some certain and limited place and time in which to start methodical seeking. The person will also think about what action or occasion might have caused the loss. This we call Remembrance, or calling to mind; the Latins call it reminiscentia, a reconnaissance of our former actions.

Sometimes the person knows a specific place that should be searched, and the mind’s thoughts will run over all parts of that place just like you would sweep a room to find a jewel, or as a dog runs about until it finds a scent, or as a poet runs through the alphabet to find a rhyme.

Sometimes we want to know the outcome of an action, and so we think of some similar action in the past, and the following sequence of events. We suppose that similar events will follow similar actions. To foresee what will happen to a criminal, we recall what has happened to criminals guilty of the same crime, and follow it through to the end – the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows. We call this sequence of thoughts foresight, prudence, providence, and sometimes wisdom, even though such conjecture could be very wrong indeed, seeing that we can’t foresee every circumstance. However, this is certain enough: the more experience a person has of past actions, the more this person is prudent. Expectations fail this person less often. The present exists in nature alone, the past exists only in our memories, but future events don’t exist at all. The future is a fiction of the mind, composed by applying the outcome of past actions to present ones. This is done with the most certainty by someone with the most experience, but even then the certainty is not enough. Yes, we call it prudence when the event happens as we foresaw it! But considered by itself, prudence is only presumption. The true foresight of things to come, which we call providence, belongs solely to the one by whose will those events are to come. From that one, and supernaturally, comes prophecy. The best prophet is quite naturally the best guesser, and the best guesser will always be the person most experienced and studied in the events being guessed, for that person has the most signs to guess by.

A Sign is an event that happens before another event that is determined to be the cause of that second event by repeated observation. The more the events are observed together, the less uncertain the sign. So anyone with the most experience in any kind of business has the most signs to use in guessing at the future. That person will be much more prudent than someone new to that business, and therefore won’t be equaled by some advantage of natural and spontaneous wit. Perhaps young people think the contrary.

However it’s not prudence that separates humans from animals. Some year old animals observe and pursue good conditions more prudently than a child of ten.

Prudence, then, is a presumption of future events, built from past experiences. There is also a presumption of past events, taken not from future events, but from past experience as well. If anyone has seen the paths and degrees by which a flourishing nation falls into civil war, and then to ruin, then upon the sight of another state’s ruins, that person will guess the same kind of wars and endeavors to have happened there as well. This conjecture has almost the same uncertainty as conjecture about the future, both being grounded only upon experience.

Is there any other activity of our minds, naturally planted within us, which needs anything more to be exercised but that we are born and live with the use of our five senses? I can’t think of a single one. I shall speak of other faculties which seem properly human ones, but they are acquired and grow strong by study and industry. They are learned by instruction and discipline, and they all proceed from the invention of words and speech. That is the sum total of the motion of a human mind: speech, separate thoughts, and sequences of thoughts. However, with speech and method, these faculties can be improved so greatly so that humans can be distinguished from all other living creatures.

Anything at all that we imagine is finite. Therefore, there is no actual idea or conception of anything we call infinite. No person could have in their mind an image of infinite magnitude. We can’t think of infinite speed, time, force, or power. When we say that something is infinite, we only mean that we can’t conceive of the ends or limits of this thing. We have no concept of this thing but our own inability. And so we use the name of God, not to say that we conceive God – God is incomprehensible! God’s power and greatness are inconceivable! – but so that we can honor God. Furthermore, since, as I said before, we can conceive nothing except what has been placed in our consciousness in some way, therefore no one can have a thought representing anything not subject to sense. We aren’t able to think of anything unless we give it some context, grant it a specific magnitude, and possibly divide it into parts. Also, we can’t conceive of something completely in two different places at the same time or two different things in the same place at once – how could such a thing form itself through our senses into our sense? Such talk is foolish speech, taken at face value without any sensibility at all from deceived philosophers and deceived or deceiving Scholars.

CHAPTER TWO: OF IMAGINATION

Nobody doubts this truth: when something is at rest, unless something else stirs it, it will be at rest forever. The opposite of this – that something in motion will stay that way unless something else stops it – is true for the same reason, namely, that nothing can change itself. However this opposite isn’t so easily agreed to. People judge all things, even other people, by themselves. They find themselves undergoing pain and exhaustion after motion, and so they think that everything else grows weary of motion. But do they try to see if there is another motion that explains this “desire of rest” that they find in themselves? For this very reason, the schools say that heavy bodies fall down because they have an appetite to rest, and that they wish to conserve their nature in their proper place – as if inanimate objects could have an appetite or know what’s best for their conservation!

When something is in motion, it moves (unless something else hinders it) eternally. Anything that does hinder it doesn’t do so in an instant. It takes time; it slows by degrees until it finally stops completely. Think of the water. Once the wind ceases, the waves keep rolling for a long time after. The same is true of motion within the internal parts of a person, in sight or in dreams and so forth. If the object we see is removed, or we shut our eyes, we still have an image of the thing seen, though this image is more obscure than actual sight. This is what the Latins call Imagination. That term applies to the image made during sight and, imperfectly, the impression made by other senses as well. The Greeks call it fancy, emphasizing appearance, and is a better term to use of all the senses.

Imagination, then, is nothing but deteriorating sense, and is found in people and many other living creatures, both when we sleep and wake.

This deterioration of sense in people who are awake is more like an obscuring of sense rather than a decay of motion, like the sun obscures starlight. The stars still shine in day and night! But our eyes, ears, and other organs are struck by so many different blows from external objects that only the strongest is sensible. So when the light of the sun is dominant, we aren’t affected by the action of the stars. And if an object is removed from our eyes, even though its impression might remain with us, there are other objects present affecting our organs of sense, and they obscure the imagination of the past as surely as a person’s voice in the noise of the day. Because of this, we know that the longer it is after the sight or sense of any object, the weaker the imagination of the object becomes. A person’s body is constantly changing within, and its internal motions serve to destroy the parts which sense moved. The distance of either time or place has the same exact effect on us. When we look at something at a distance, it seems dim, and its parts are not distinct – if someone speaks from a distance, the voice is weak. In the same way, the distance of time erodes our imagination of the past. We lose streets in the cities we used to walk; we lose the details of actions in which we were participants. Should we want to express the actual thing in our decaying sense, we speak of imagination, but to emphasize the decay, we say Memory – the sense is fading, old, and past. Imagination and memory, then, are one thing, meaning different things because of different considerations.

Accumulated memory is called Experience.

I stress this: imagination is only of things formerly perceived by sense. We do this either all at once, or by parts at several times. Simple imagination is imagination of the whole object, as it was presented to our senses before – this is “all-at-once” imagination. The second way is compounded, such as having seen a person at one time, and a horse at another, our minds compose something called a centaur. A person may compound his own self-image with the image of another person’s actions, such as when a man imagines himself a Hercules or a Napoleon (something that happens often to those who read romantic literature). This is a compound imagination, a fiction of the mind.

Another kind of imagination is when something makes a very strong impression through our senses. When we look at the sun, an image of the sun remains before our eyes a long time after; when someone spends hours upon hours concentrating on geometrical figures, they can lie awake and have the images of lines and angles float in their eyes. This type of fancy doesn’t have a particular name – it’s not something that people have ever talked about much.

The imaginations of sleeping people we call dreams. These, like all other imaginations, have been either totally or by parts in our senses. When we are asleep, the brain and nerves, the necessary organs of sense, are numbed with sleep. They cannot be easily moved by the actions of external objects. Therefore any imagination, and therefore any dream, must consist solely of the agitation of the internal parts of a person’s body. It’s this internal disturbance which keeps the brain and nerves in motion, and the imaginations thus stirred up make it appear that we are awake. There is nothing to relieve us of this impression – the brain is numbed to the external world. No external impression can obscure these internal impressions, and so a dream, in the silence of sense, is clearer than our waking thoughts.

For this reason it is extremely difficult (some think it impossible) to distinguish between Sense and Dreaming precisely. This is how I prefer to do so: in dreams, I don’t usually think of the same people, places, objects, and actions as I do when awake. I also don’t recognize a long or consistent train of thought during dreams. When awake, I can easily recognize the absurdity of dreams, but I never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts. When I’m awake, I know that I’m not dreaming, but when I dream, I think I’m awake.

Dreams are caused by the disturbance of internal parts of the body, so difference disturbances cause different dreams. Lying in the cold will breed dreams of fear, which raises the image of some fearful object. The brain moves the internal parts, and the parts the brain. When we’re awake, anger causes parts of our body to heat up; when we’re asleep, if those same parts are overheated, it causes anger, and raises the image of an enemy in the brain. Natural kindness when awake causes desire, and desire heats other parts of the body – so too much heat in those areas while asleep will raise desire, and cause an imagination of a received kindness. So to sum up, dreams are the reverse of waking imagination – the motion begins at one end while we are awake and at the other when we dream.

The most difficult time to distinguish between our dreams and waking thoughts is when we accidentally do not recognize that we have fallen asleep. This happens easily to someone troubled with fearful thought or a muddied conscience, and who then goes to sleep without going through the habits of bedtime – as one who sleeps in a chair. Someone who has taken the time to industriously lay down to sleep and then experiences an exorbitant fancy can hardly consider it anything but a dream. Think of Marcus Brutus (someone who owed his life and station to Caesar, who was his favorite, and yet who murdered him). At Philippi, the night before he went into battle against Augustus Caesar, he saw a fearful apparition. Some historians call this event a vision, but under the given circumstances it could have been a short dream. As he sat in his tent, pensive and disturbed by the horror of his rash act, it wasn’t hard for him, sleeping in the cold, to dream of what most frightened him. And as the dream caused him to wake by degrees, so the apparition slowly vanished – and having no certainty of his falling asleep, he had no reason to think it a dream, and so it became a “vision”. This isn’t an uncommon thing. Even people who are completely awake, if they are craven or superstitious, thinking of fearful tales, and alone in the dark, even they are subject to similar fancies, and think they see spirits and dead men’s ghosts walking in churchyards. This is either their fancy only, or else the trickery of people who would make use of such superstitious fear to go disguised in the night to places at which they wouldn’t want others to know that they frequent.

This ignorance of how to interpret dreams and other strong fancies from vision and sense gave birth to the greater part of religions of the Gentiles in times past. They worshipped satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and the like; and even today, people give credence to things like fairies, ghosts, goblins, and the power of witches. Considering witches, I don’t think their witchcraft has any real power, but they are justly punished for their false belief that they can do such mischief, which is accompanied by their intent to do so if they could. This makes their trade more a new religion than a craft or a science. Fairies and walking ghosts have been either taught or not refuted in order to ensure the continued use of exorcism, crosses, holy water, and other such inventions of spiritual people. Without a doubt, God can make unnatural apparitions, but to think that God does this so often that we need to fear these things more than the natural disasters that God can also avert or release is to stray away from Christian thought. Evil people use this known power of God to say anything that serves their purpose, even though they know the untruth of what they speak. Wise people would do good to believe them no further than reason makes their statements credible. If all these superstitious fears of spirits were taken away, along with fortune-telling from dreams, false prophecies, and all the other ways that the unscrupulous employ to abuse the general populace, people would be much more suited than they are for civil obedience.

This task ought to be the work of the schools, but they actually nourish such thoughts. They don’t understand imagination and how the sense work, and so what they receive, they teach. They say imagination rises of itself, and has no cause. Others say they rise from the will, and good thoughts are breathed (inspired) into a person by God, and evil thoughts by the Devil. Some say the senses receive the “species” of things and then deliver them to the sense, and the sense gives them to the fancy, and the fancy to the memory, and the memory to the judgment, just as people pass things back and forth, and thus with many words they keep anything from being understood.

The imagination that is raised in a person (or any creature that possesses the ability to imagine) by words or other invented signs, is what we usually call Understanding. This is seen in both people and animals. A dog can learn to understand the call of its master, and so will many animals. A person’s understanding is unique through the range of thinking by the sequencing and framing of the names of things into positive and negative statements, and also other forms of speech. I shall talk of this kind of understanding right now.

PART ONE – OF HUMANITY

CHAPTER ONE

In our discussion of a person’s thoughts, I will first talk about them separately, and then how they link and depend upon each other.

Separately, each individual thought is a representation of some quality or aspect of a body outside of ourselves. A general term for any body outside of ourselves is an object, and objects work on our eyes and ears and other parts of our bodies. The different ways an object has to work upon our senses produces the differences of appearances in the world.

The origin of all thought is what we call consciousness or sense (because every single concept in a person’s mind has been put there via the organs of sense). All thoughts are derived from sense.

In this discussion, it’s not necessary to examine where sense comes from, and I’ve written a lot about it elsewhere. But I will share a summary of that past writing to be complete.

The cause of sense is that external object, which presses against each of our sense organs in appropriate ways. Objects press immediately against our organs of touch and taste. They use a medium to press against our other organs (sight, sound, and smell). From there, all impressions use the mediation of nerves to continue into the brain and heart. That pressure causes a counter-pressure, a resistance – the heart pushes back against this pressure. It’s this counter-pressure that seems to be some matter outside the body. This “seeming”, or fancy, is what we call Sense – in the eye, sense looks like light or color; in the ear, like sound; to the nose, sense is an odor; to the tongue and palate, a savor; and to the rest of the body, sense is heat, cold, hardness, softness, and other qualities or aspects that the body recognizes in sensation.

Now all these sensible qualities that appear separate to us are just different motions in the body that causes the sensation. Even inside us, the pressures produced inside us are just different kinds of motions as well (motion produces nothing but motion). But the way they appear to us is what we call fancy, and fancy is the same whether sleeping or awake. If you press your eye, you will think you see a strange light, and when you press your ear, you fancy that you hear a whirring sound. The bodies we see or hear are producing a fancy within us exactly the same way, by pressing against our various organs of sense in ways appropriate to them.

If those colors and sounds were inside the bodies that cause them, they couldn’t be severed from them – as for example, when by using a lenses you can see the thing in one place and an appearance of the thing in another. Sometimes at the proper distance it seems impossible to think anything else but that the real object is exactly the same as the fancy we have received from it – but the object is always one thing, and the image or fancy is another. Conciousness, then, in every case is nothing else but the original fancy caused by the pressure, that is, the motion of external things upon our eyes, ears, and other organs.

Philosophy schools in all the universities of Christendom say differently, because they rely on certain passages found in Aristotle’s writings. To explain vision, they say that the “visible” thing sends out on all sides a visible “species”, or in plain English, a visible show or apparition, or a being seen. Receiving this thing in our eyes is called seeing. The same is said about hearing – a audible “species”, an audible being seen, is sent out which is received in the ear, that is called hearing. If you can believe it, they even explain understanding the same way – the thing understood sends out an “intelligible” species, an intelligible being seen, that goes into our understanding, and makes us understand.

I’m not telling you this to make anyone swear off universities. I have to speak of them later, when I talk of their proper place in the Commonwealth. As we go along, I want you to see the various things that must be fixed in them – one being, their habitual use of unintelligible speech.

Recently Billmon alluded to someone putting Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan into colloquial English. Having updated Hume's On Miracles, I thought I would give it a shot. However, Hobbes' prose resists everyday English – imagine that. I'll try to make it as easy as possible while still getting the points (as I see them) across.

As I get a chapter done, I'll post it here. Feel free to correct me in comments if I've misunderstood what's happening in the book. Once I get the entire work finished, I'll make it a PDF and post a link in the sidebar for downloading, just as I've done with the Hume paraphrase.

INTRODUCTION

Nature is God’s Art. With it, He made and governs the world. We humans use our own art to imitate it, making machines like artificial animals to do our work. Even the most rational and incredible work of Nature, the human, is mimicked by the body politic – the Commonwealth, the State, a Leviathan made by humanity. In all its parts it can be seen like an artificial human, built for the protection and defense of its weak makers. Its sovereignty, that which gives life and motion to the body, is like the human’s soul; the various offices of government make up joints; societal reward and punishment (attached to the soul, by which every joint and member are moved to do their duty) are the nerves; the strength of the body politic is found in the common wealth of the various members; the safety of the people is its occupation; councilors become its memory, giving it educated advice on the proper course to take; justice and law its reason and will; peace is its health, sedition its sickness, and civil war its death. Even the mutual decisions and will that brought the State into being can be compared to the Almighty’s “Let there be humanity.”

I want to discuss the nature of the Leviathan in four ways:

• First we should examine its contents, and also who made it – both things being one thing, humans.
• Then we will look at the Leviathan as a whole: how and by what agreements it is made, the natural power and just limitations of its sovereign, how it is preserved, and how it is dissolved.
• We shall then explore the meaning of a Christian Commonwealth.
• And finally, we shall determine what exactly the Kingdom of Darkness is.

Now many have recently said that wisdom is attained not by reading books but by reading people. It’s sad to see that some people do nothing but think they have read people correctly and go behind their backs to run them down based on their assumed knowledge. They’d do well to consider another less-known phrase: Read yourself. This phrase, too, has been abused. Some use it as condemnation for an unjust official, and others as grounds for thinking themselves better than others.

No, the many individual members of humanity are very similar in their passions and thinking. Suppose one person looks within and learns what and why she or he is thinking, opining, reasoning, hoping, fearing, etc. in the majority of situations. That person then has a window into the thoughts and passions of other people in those same situations. I say “passions” to be precise – desires, fears, hopes. No one has a window into the object of passions – what is being desired or feared in a particular situation. This varies by the different circumstances of each individual person. The particular objects of a person’s desire are so easily kept from our knowledge, through deceit, lying, counterfeit, and bad teachings, that only the Searcher of Hearts can find them. Sometimes we learn a person’s designs from a person’s actions, but if we do this without comparing those designs with our own, and thinking about the circumstances that could alter those designs, we are trying to decipher a code without the key, and risk being deceived further.

Should an ordinary person learn to read others, it only helps with that person’s acquaintances. But the rulers of humanity must look within themselves to understand all of humanity, a far more difficult task. But read my book here, as I attempt to set down my own understanding of this task, and when I am done, see if you find it within your own heart just as I have said. There’s no other way to make my point.