Top 26 Quotes by Samuel Alexander

We cannot therefore say that mental acts contain a cognitive as well as a conative element.

For psychological purposes the most important differences in conation are those in virtue of which the object is revealed as sensed or perceived or imaged or remembered or thought.

An expectation is a future object, recognised as belonging to me.

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience.

But unfortunately Locke treated ideas of reflection as if they were another class of objects of contemplation beside ideas of sensation.

But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value.

Psychology is the science of the act of experiencing, and deals with the whole system of such acts as they make up mental life.

The mental act of sensation which issues in reflex movement is so simple as to defy analysis.

It is convenient to distinguish the two kinds of experience which have thus been described, the experienc-ing and the experienc-ed, by technical words.

Mental life is indeed practical through and through. It begins in practice and it ends in practice.