The Second Dimension of Human Life: the Life of the Soul and its Three Principal Functions. The First Function: the Intellectual Faculty and its Varieties. Knowledge and Science. The Normal Operations of Reason and the Idle Wandering of Thoughts

You had been looking within; let us go there again. Look at the multitude and variety of actions and movements there! Now one thing, now another; now something enters, now it exits; now something is accepted, now rejected; things are done and redone. For the soul is ever in motion and cannot stand still. If we were to look at the soul all at once, we would make nothing of it—its activities must be sorted into kinds, and each kind then examined separately. This has long since been done: all the activities of the soul have been distributed into three classes—thoughts, desires, and feelings—with each called a separate aspect of the soul: the thinking, the desiring, and the feeling. Let us take this division and begin to survey each aspect.

The thinking aspect. If there is turmoil within us, it has its greatest scope in the thoughts; desires and feelings are already agitated under the action of thoughts. But within the class of thoughts not everything is disorderly movement—there is among them a series of serious occupations. These are what properly constitute the real business of mental soul-life on the side of thoughts. Here are those occupations:

1. As soon as you have noticed something outside by means of your senses, or have heard others recount what they have noticed with their senses, imagination at once imagines it and memory retains it—and nothing can enter the soul except through imagination and memory. Subsequent mental activity, too, rests upon imagination and memory. What memory has not preserved cannot be imagined, and will not even be thought about. Sometimes thoughts are born directly out of the soul, but even they are immediately clothed in an image. And so the thinking aspect of the soul is entirely image-based.

2. But imagination and memory obtain and store only the material for thoughts. The movement of thoughts itself proceeds from the soul and is carried on by its laws. Recall how your younger brother, on seeing some new object, would at once turn to you or to others with questions: «What is this? Who made it? What is it made of?» — and would not be at peace until all these questions were answered to his satisfaction. The thinking activity of the soul begins precisely with the raising of such questions, and generates thoughts in response to them, or accepts ready-made thoughts about the matter from others. Imagination and memory do not think. They are the unskilled laborers, the subordinate forces. The faculty of the soul from which such questions arise, and by means of which thoughts are sought and generated in answer to them, is called the reason, whose work it is to reason, to reflect, and to find the required solutions. Observe yourself—and you will find that nothing is done by you without deliberation and reflection. Every little thing has to be considered. However instantaneously it may be done, deliberation always enters in and follows the questions outlined above.

3. While you are deliberating, no definite thought has yet been formed. A definite thought takes shape when you find the resolution of one of those questions. Your reason keeps searching, seeking to find what a given thing is, where it comes from, what it is for, and so on. When you find such a resolution yourself, or, having heard it from others, agree with it, you commonly say: «Now I understand; there is nothing more to discuss; the matter is settled.» This resolution gives your thinking faculty peace with regard to the subject that had been engaging it. The reason then turns to other matters, while the thought that has been formed is consigned to the soul’s archive—memory—from which it is drawn as needed to help resolve other questions and to serve as material for forming other thoughts. The sum of all the ideas formed in this way constitutes your cast of thought, which you reveal on every occasion in your conversation. This is the domain of your knowledge, acquired by you through mental labor. The more questions you have resolved, the greater the number of definite thoughts or conceptions about things; the more such conceptions, the wider the circle of your knowledge. And so, as you see, above memory and imagination stands the reason, which through its mental labor obtains for you definite conceptions or cognitions of things.

Not every question succeeds in obtaining a definite answer. Most of them remain unresolved. People think and think and arrive at nothing definite. So they say: perhaps it is this way, or perhaps it is that way. This gives rise to opinions and conjectures—of which, taken altogether, do we not have more than we have settled cognitions?

When someone, in reflecting on a particular class of objects, has both independently gathered and borrowed from others so many definite thoughts and ideas about them, and has managed to supplement what remains unsettled with such apt opinions and conjectures, that he can consider that circle of objects sufficiently known and clarified—he then sets all that he has obtained in order, expounds it with coherence and sequence, and presents us with a science of those objects. Science is the crown of the reason’s mental labor.

I am telling you all of this so that you may see more clearly what the natural, legitimate activity of our thinking power should consist in. It ought to be diligently reflecting on what is not yet known, in order to come to know it. Only very few are called to be men of learning; not everyone can pursue the sciences; but to reflect on the things that surround us in order to arrive at definite conceptions of them is both possible and necessary for everyone. That is what the thinking power should be occupied with in all of us. How much it will obtain depends on its own strength—but it must always be engaged in the serious work of deliberation and reflection on realities. Meanwhile, what do we see in our mental domain? A continuous movement of images and representations without any definite aim or order. Thoughts rise up one after another and now proceed in a row, now contradict one another, now run ahead, now turn back, now dart to one side, settling on nothing. This is not reasoning, but a wandering and scattering of thoughts—a state entirely contrary to what our thinking power ought to be—a sickness of it so deeply rooted and so common to all that you will not find a single person who is able to sustain serious mental effort continuously without being subject to distraction and wandering of thoughts that tears him from his work and carries him off in various directions. We often fall into a reverie. What is that state? It is this: the mind descends into the archive of memory and, with the help of imagination, rummages through all the accumulated clutter there, passing from one recollection to another according to the known laws of the association of representations, weaving in with what has been things that have not been and often even things that are impossible—until it comes to itself and returns to surrounding reality. People say: he became absorbed in thought. He did—but in emptiness, not in the serious consideration of a matter. This is the same as dreaming while asleep—idle thinking and empty thinking. Observe yourself—and you will see that most of our time passes in precisely this kind of empty thinking and wandering of thoughts. On many a day (and are there not more of such days than any other?) not a single serious thought comes to mind. I ask you to take note of this and occupy yourself with the question: is it fitting for a rational creature to act so? And I, in the meantime, will turn to the other classes of soul-activity.