Sir William Hamilton

Capacity is now properly limited to these [the mere passive operations of the mind]; its primary signification, which is literally room for, as well as its employment, favors this; although it can not be denied that there are examples of its usage in an active sense.

Cartesian

The Cartesion argument for reality of matter.

Cogitable

Creation is cogitable by us only as a putting forth of divine power.

Conative

This division of mind into the three great classes of the cognitive faculties, the feelings, . . . and the exertive or conative powers, . . . was first promulgated by Kant.

Concentrative

A discrimination is only possible by a concentrative act, or act of attention.

Concept

The words conception, concept, notion, should be limited to the thought of what can not be represented in the imagination; as, the thought suggested by a general term.

Condition

To think of a thing is to condition.

Conditioned

Under these, thought is possible only in the conditioned interval.

Consciousness

Consciousness is thus, on the one hand, the recognition by the mind or “ego” of its acts and affections; -- in other words, the self-affirmation that certain modifications are known by me, and that these modifications are mine.

Annihilate the consciousness of the object, you annihilate the consciousness of the operation.

Conspiration

In our natural body every part has a nacassary sympathy with every other, and all together form, by their harmonious onspiration, a healthy whole.

Contort

Kant contorted the term category from the proper meaning of attributed.

Cosmopolitan

In other countries taste is perphaps too exclusively national, in Germany it is certainly too cosmopolite.

Cosmothetic

The cosmothetic idealists . . . deny that mind is immediately conscious of matter.

Counterbalance

The study of mind is necessary to counterbalance and correct the influence of the study of nature.

Counterview

M. Peisse has ably advocated the counterview in his preface and appendix.

Credulity

That implict credulity is the mark of a feeble mind will not be disputed.

Definitude

Definitude . . . is a knowledge of minute differences.

Delitescence

The delitescence of mental activities.

Dianoetic

I would employ . . . dianoetic to denote the operation of the discursive, elaborative, or comparative faculty.

Discount

Of the three opinions (I discount Brown's).

Divisibility

Divisibility . . . is a primary attribute of matter.

Divisible

Extended substance . . . is divisible into parts.

Doubt

Doubt is the beginning and the end of our efforts to know.

emphasis

External objects stand before us . . . in all the life and emphasis of extension, figure, and color.

Empiric

In philosophical language, the term empirical means simply what belongs to or is the product of experience or observation.

Encephalos

In man the encephalos reaches its full size about seven years of age.

Extension

The law is that the intension of our knowledge is in the inverse ratio of its extension.

Flexion

Express the syntactical relations by flexion.

Flounder

They have floundered on from blunder to blunder.

Generalization

Generalization is only the apprehension of the one in the many.

generalize

When a fact is generalized, our discontent is quited, and we consider the generality itself as tantamount to an explanation.

Generification

Out of this the universal is elaborated by generification.

Gravitate

Why does this apple fall to the ground? Because all bodies gravitate toward each other.

Hyperphysical

Those who do not fly to some hyperphysical hypothesis.

Hypothetic

Causes hypothetical at least, if not real, for the various phenomena of the existence of which our experience informs us.

Identity

Identity is a relation between our cognitions of a thing, not between things themselves.

Imagination

The imagination of common language -- the productive imagination of philosophers -- is nothing but the representative process plus the process to which I would give the name of the “comparative.”

Immanent

A cognition is an immanent act of mind.

Impuberal

In impuberal animals the cerebellum is, in proportion to the brain proper, greatly less than in adults.

Incognizance

This incognizance may be explained.

Incognizant

Of the several operations themselves, as acts of volition, we are wholly incognizant.

Induction

Induction is an inference drawn from all the particulars.

Inept

To view attention as a special act of intelligence, and to distinguish it from consciousness, is utterly inept.

Insentient

But there can be nothing like to this sensation in the rose, because it is insentient.

Instinct

An instinct is an agent which performs blindly and ignorantly a work of intelligence and knowledge.

Intension

This law is, that the intension of our knowledge is in the inverse ratio of its extension.

Judgment

A judgment is the mental act by which one thing is affirmed or denied of another.

Knowable

Thus mind and matter, as known or knowable, are only two different series of phenomena or qualities.

Knowledge

Knowledges is a term in frequent use by Bacon, and, though now obsolete, should be revived, as without it we are compelled to borrow “cognitions” to express its import.

Latency

To simplify the discussion, I shall distinguish three degrees of this latency.

Logic

Logic is the science of the laws of thought, as thought; that is, of the necessary conditions to which thought, considered in itself, is subject.

Mean

Philosophical doubt is not an end, but a mean.

Mediate

An act of mediate knowledge is complex.

Metaphysics

Now the science conversant about all such inferences of unknown being from its known manifestations, is called ontology, or metaphysics proper.

Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science or complement of sciences exclusively occupied with mind.

Method

All method is a rational progress, a progress toward an end.

Mind

What we mean by mind is simply that which perceives, thinks, feels, wills, and desires.

Momentum

I shall state the several momenta of the distinction in separate propositions.

Moot

A problem which hardly has been mentioned, much less mooted, in this country.

Noetic

I would employ the word noetic to express all those cognitions which originate in the mind itself.

Nonvernacular

A nonvernacular expression.

Notice

Another circumstance was noticed in connection with the suggestion last discussed.

Notion

Notion, again, signifies either the act of apprehending, signalizing, that is, the remarking or taking note of, the various notes, marks, or characters of an object which its qualities afford, or the result of that act.

Outness

The outness of the objects of sense.

philosophize

Man philosophizes as he lives. He may philosophize well or ill, but philosophize he must.

Potential

Potential existence means merely that the thing may be at ome time; actual existence, that it now is.

Power

Power, then, is active and passive; faculty is active power or capacity; capacity is passive power.

Practice

There is a distinction, but no opposition, between theory and practice; each, to a certain extent, supposes the other; theory is dependent on practice; practice must have preceded theory.

Practice is exercise of an art, or the application of a science in life, which application is itself an art.

Presentative

The latter term, presentative faculty, I use . . . in contrast and correlation to a “representative faculty.”

Property

Property is correctly a synonym for peculiar quality; but it is frequently used as coextensive with quality in general.

Protensive

Time is a protensive quantity.

Psychology

Psychology, the science conversant about the phenomena of the mind, or conscious subject, or self.

Realize

We can not realize it in thought, that the object . . . had really no being at any past moment.

Rebarbarize

Germany . . . rebarbarized by polemical theology and religious wars.

Recompose

The far greater number of the objects presented to our observation can only be decomposed, but not actually recomposed.

Redargue

Now this objection to the immediate cognition of external objects has, as far as I know, been redargued in three different ways.

Reflect

We can not be said to reflect upon any external object, except so far as that object has been previously perceived, and its image become part and parcel of our intellectual furniture.

Reminiscent

Some other of existence of which we have been previously conscious, and are now reminiscent.

Retortion

It was, however, necessary to possess some single term expressive of this intellectual retortion.

Revivify

Some association may revivify it enough to make it flash, after a long oblivion, into consciousness.

Ruffle

These ruffle the tranquillity of the mind.

Sake

Knowledge is for the sake of man, and not man for the sake of knowledge.

Science

Science is . . . a complement of cognitions, having, in point of form, the character of logical perfection, and in point of matter, the character of real truth.

Secern

Averroes secerns a sense of titillation, and a sense of hunger and thirst.

Seductive

This may enable us to understand how seductive is the influence of example.

Seesaw

He has been arguing in a circle; there is thus a seesaw between the hypothesis and fact.

Self

The self, the I, is recognized in every act of intelligence as the subject to which that act belongs. It is I that perceive, I that imagine, I that remember, I that attend, I that compare, I that feel, I that will, I that am conscious.

Sensation

Perception is only a special kind of knowledge, and sensation a special kind of feeling. . . . Knowledge and feeling, perception and sensation, though always coexistent, are always in the inverse ratio of each other.

Sentiment

Sentiment, as here and elsewhere employed by Reid in the meaning of opinion (sententia), is not to be imitated.

Sequacious

The scheme of pantheistic omniscience so prevalent among the sequacious thinkers of the day.

Similarity

Hardly is there a similarity detected between two or three facts, than men hasten to extend it to all.

Sist

Some, however, have preposterously sisted nature as the first or generative principle.

Skeptic

All this criticism [of Hume] proceeds upon the erroneous hypothesis that he was a dogmatist. He was a skeptic; that is, he accepted the principles asserted by the prevailing dogmatism: and only showed that such and such conclusions were, on these principles, inevitable.

Slump

These different groups . . . are exclusively slumped together under that sense.

State

State is a term nearly synonymous with “mode,” but of a meaning more extensive, and is not exclusively limited to the mutable and contingent.

Subject

That which manifests its qualities -- in other words, that in which the appearing causes inhere, that to which they belong -- is called their subject or substance, or substratum.

The philosophers of mind have, in a manner, usurped and appropriated this expression to themselves. Accordingly, in their hands, the phrases conscious or thinking subject, and subject, mean precisely the same thing.

Subsumption

The first act of consciousness was a subsumption of that of which we were conscious under this notion.

Swamp

Having swamped himself in following the ignis fatuus of a theory.

Synthesis

Analysis and synthesis, though commonly treated as two different methods, are, if properly understood, only the two necessary parts of the same method. Each is the relative and correlative of the other.

Term

The subject and predicate of a proposition are, after Aristotle, together called its terms or extremes.

Thought

This [faculty], to which I gave the name of the “elaborative faculty,” -- the faculty of relations or comparison, -- constitutes what is properly denominated thought.

Unacquaintance

He was then in happy unacquaintance with everything connected with that obnoxious cavity.

Understanding

I use the term understanding, not for the noetic faculty, intellect proper, or place of principles, but for the dianoetic or discursive faculty in its widest signification, for the faculty of relations or comparisons; and thus in the meaning in which “verstand” is now employed by the Germans.

Unify

Perception is thus a unifying act.

Untwine

It requires a long and powerful counter sympathy in a nation to untwine the ties of custom which bind a people to the established and the old.

Utilitarian

But what is a utilitarian? Simply one who prefers the useful to the useless; and who does not?

Vice

Mark the vice of the procedure.