You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author undertakes a critical analysis of six theories of the mind: mind as substance, as process, as relation, as intentional act, as substantive, and as function. He carries through this very difficult program successfully, but without his assistance one would feel as if one were in a jungle of private opinions but he is able to show the relationship of these different theories to their evolutional development. He pays particular attention to the contributions to this field which have been made by American philosophers.
The book starts off with the statement “that there have been three ‘moments’ in the history of speculation concerning the mind: a period in which mind and nature are only vaguely conceived and vaguely differentiated; a period in which mind and nature are regarded as different in kind and as sharply separated and opposed; and a period in which the effort is to restore, at a more complex level, the intimate connection of mind and nature with which thought began,” and in the last pages of the last chapter he quotes Dewey as follows:
“If such changes do not constitute, in the depth and scope of their significance, a reversal comparable to a Copernican revolution, I am at a loss to know where such a change can be found or what it would be like. The old center was mind knowing by means of an equipment of powers complete within itself, and merely exercised upon an antecedent external material equally complete in itself. The new center is indefinite interactions taking place within a course of nature which is not fixed and complete, but which is capable of direction to new and different results through the mediation of intentional operations. … Mind is no longer a spectator beholding the world from without and finding its highest satisfaction in the joy of self-sufficing contemplation. The mind is within the world as part of the latter's own on-going process. It is marked off as mind by the fact that wherever it is found, changes take place in a directed