MENTAL FUNCTION 403 



beauty. A trapper sees them as the homes of animals and as sources 

 of firewood. The forester and the botanist find in them chiefly a 

 subject for study. Yet the forest of trees has mostly the same physical 

 properties for all. It is the nature of the perceiving self, as determined 

 largely by its habits or its will, that decides the direction of the conscious- 

 ness of that individual. We should expect, for example, a clergyman 

 who saw a street-fight to try to stop it in some way, but if a passing 

 pugilist did so we might be somewhat surprised. The nature of the 

 selfness then determines not only the trend of the internal consciousness 

 but the external bodily activity as well. 



Besides these three general characteristics of the mental process, we 

 find differences in quality, quantity, and intensity. The qualities we 

 shall soon attempt to discriminate and briefly to describe. An example 

 of quality is painfulness. The quantity of the mental process at any 

 time is what is technically known as the extensity of the experience. 

 As an example, the exposed nerves of four teeth give a more extensive 

 pain than that of one would give. The intensity of consciousness at any 

 one time means the degree of interest which it has for the individual. 

 A severe ache in a tooth is more interesting than a milder one would be. 



There is one other general attribute of the total stream of conscious- 

 ness which must be noted: it has at different times every degree of fulness. 

 The range in this respect is from the most conscious experience (the 

 most intense pain, the most exquisite pleasure, or the deepest thought) 

 down to the vanishing-point of sub-consciousness at the " lower" levels. 

 From the physiological point of view these sub-conscious mental pro- 

 cesses merge into protoplasmic forces, especially into nervous impulses. 



The Descriptive Aspects of Consciousness. Introspection of our 

 passing mental experience shows us that it has three dominant aspects 

 that we may denote as feeling, willing, and knowing. 



The term aspect used in this sense is theoretically important as well 

 as descriptive. The aspects of consciousness are not parts of it, but 

 rather precisely what the term itself with sufficient clearness indicates. 

 If in every period of adult human consciousness we can discover elements 

 of feeling, willing, and knowing, it is not that these are in any sense 

 separate portions of the conscious stream. At one time one of them 

 may be the most conspicuous and the next moment perhaps another. 

 These three are various ways of looking at the mental process, aspects 

 abstracted for the purposes of scientific description from a continuum 

 which is not objectively separable into different processes. Every 

 temporal portion of consciousness (with exceptions which will be noted 

 later) has all of these three aspects of feeling, willing, and knowing. 

 These phases are mentally abstracted for purposes of description as if 

 they were actually separate. 



Feeling. The word feeling is the psychological term for a class of 

 mental events, and it must not be confused in any way with the term 

 used so variously in common speech feeling a touch, feeling cold, feeling 

 a pin-prick, etc. These, as we saw in studying the senses, are sensations. 



