GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

*68 ETHICS
contribute. Nevertheless) most of those who have written
upon this topic have felt themselves able to announce
with some degree of unanimity that their reasons can and
do motivate them to action. There are two general considerations
which may be relevantly mentioned
(i) THAT THERE is NO CLEAR-CUT DIVISION OF
FACULTIES. First, no sharp division of faculties, between
reason and emotion or between reason and passion, is
feasible. As I pointed out when discussing Plato's three-
fold division of the soul 1
, most psychologists are agreed
that, to speak of the human psyche as if it were a bundle
of faculties, as if, for example, it were or contained reason
plus will plus emotion, is to falsify the facts of consciousness.
We can only do justice to these facts by conceiving of the
psyche as at any given moment functioning in a predominantly
reasonable or a predominantly emotional way. I
suggest elsewhere* that the activity of consciousness is
always in essence cognitive, that an act of consciousness
is, that is to say, always a knowing of something other than
itself upon which the activity of consciousness is directed.
Whether a particular state of consciousness is such as we
call reasonable, or whether we describe it rather as emo-
tional or appetitive depends upon the degree to which the
cognitive activity of knowing is emotionally or desirefiilly
coloured. The questions raised by this assertion belong to
the theory of knowledge and cannot be pursued here. What
for our present purpose is important is the recognition
that, whatever the nature of the psychological activity
in which at any given moment we happen to be engaged,
it is not a special faculty, for example, reason or imagination
or emotion or desire, which is being called into play, but
the whole psyche which at that moment is expressed in
the activity.
As I pointed out when discussing Plato's theory of the
soul1 it is , not the case that the soul is divided into three
1 *
See Chapter II, pp. 55-57. See Chapter XI, pp. 410-412.
See Chapter II, pp. 56, 57.