Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind

Chapter I. On the Powers of the Mind, and First on the Understanding

111 u p a r t i i u On the Human Mind c h a p t e r 1 On the Powers of the Mind, and First on the Understanding 1. The definition of pneumatology The science of spirits is called pneumatics by modern writers; among the ancients it was a part of metaphysics or of physics.1 But as we have nocertain knowledge of any spirits other than human minds and the good God almighty , when we rely on the resources of our own reason alone, they will necessarily be the principal subjects of our discussion. And since we must progress from things that we know in order to bring more obscure things to light, without regard to the dignity of the things themselves,pneumatics rightly begins from knowledge of the human mind. Spirit is substance which thinks or can think Spirit, soul, mind denote the same nature, whatever it may be, which thinks or can think, and which is conscious of its own actions.2 It is likely that there 1. On the study of pneumatology in Scottish universities in the early eighteenth century , see the introduction, p. xxii. 2. In the first edition (1742), the text continued after this sentence with a discussion 112 a synopsis of metaphysics is a very large number of such natures, various orders of them, in fact, equipped with various powers: most of them much inferior to human minds with which they have very little in common, but many also perhaps which are superior. Though all of them are called by the same name of spirit or soul, they are almost a whole world, as they say, different fromeach other. We must first give some account of the powers of minds before determining anything about their nature. It is quite obvious that the human soul is distinct from the gross body which is accessible totheexternalsenses, since no one has said that thought, prudence, arts, or virtues are located in flesh or bones, or in the veins or gross humors. 2. The twofold power of minds: understanding and willing Since no one has yet shown whether there is any power in the mind which causes the body to grow and flourish and be nurtured by the food it takes in, we shall ignore the auxetic and threptic force of the soul which the ancients so often mentioned.3 The other powers of the mind we might reasonably reduce to two, namely, the faculty of understanding and the faculty of willing, which are concerned respectively with knowing things and with rendering life happy.4 The senses report to the understanding, which is those powers or that of spirit and the ways in which spirit differs from body. This order of presentation followed de Vries, Determinationes Pneumatologicae, sec. 1, in De Natura Dei et Humanae Mentis. In the second edition of A Synopsis of Metaphysics (1744) this discussionhasbeen moved to chap. 3, pp. 138–44. 3. The auxetic and threptic powers of the soul are Aristotle’s terms for the powers responsible for the “growth” and “nourishment” of all living things. See Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 4, especially 415 a23, p. 85 in the Hett translation. 4. De Vries, Determinationes Pneumatologicae, sec. 2, chap. 6. Locke thought that the distinction of the faculties into understanding and willing had “misled many into a confused notion of so many distinct agents in us.” Essay, II, 21, 6, p. 237. In contrast to Locke, Hutcheson liked to remind his critics of the importance of the distinction between the understanding and the will: An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1742), pp. 30–31n., and Illustrations upon the Moral Sense (1742), pp. 219–22. part ii: on the human mind 113 ordering of the soul by which, at the prompting of certain things, it immediately receives certain ideas, which are not alterable at itsdiscretion,but which a certain superior nature, the parent and creator of the soul, seems to have formed; and he has so structured the mind that it refers certain sensations to external things, as images which depict their nature or qualities. Sensations and their causes Learned men have adopted different opinions about the cause and origin of ideas. None of them can affirm anything beyond this one single point: that ideas arise in the mind from a certain contact with things, according to certain...