On Oct 11, 2016, at 9:14 AM, Mike Palij <[email protected]> wrote: > So, what's the source? William James is often associated with > the quote in Subject line but, like icebergs and Freud, no sources > or references are given. Or did I miss it? Send me something.
I do not find that exact quote. However, the 5th para. of chapter 14 (Association) of James’ Principles of Psychology expresses a similar idea: The truth must be admitted that thought works under conditions imposed ab extra. The great law of habit itself -- that twenty experiences make us recall a thing better than one, that long indulgence in error makes right thinking almost impossible -- seems to have no essential foundation in reason. The business of thought is with truth -- the number of experiences ought to have nothing to do with her hold of it; and she ought by right to be able to hug it all the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. The contrary arrangements seem quite fantastic and arbitrary, but nevertheless are part of the very bone and marrow of our minds. Reason is only one out of a thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count all the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Who can swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified opinions? It is true that a presiding arbiter seems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the better suggestions into permanence, while it ends by droopping out and leaving unrecorded the confusion. But this is all the difference. The mode of genesis of the worthy and the worthless seems the same. The laws of our actual thinking, of the cogitatum, must account alike for the bad and the good materials on which the arbiter has to decide, for wisdom and for folly. The laws of the arbiter, of the cogitandum, of what we ought to think, are to the former as the [p. 553] laws of ethics are to those of history. Who but an Hegelian historian ever pretended that reason in action was per se a sufficient explanation of the political changes in Europe? Chris ….. Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 43.773895°, -79.503670° [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo ………………………………... --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=49671 or send a blank email to leave-49671-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
