6. Вторая сторона человеческой жизни: жизнь душевная – и три главных ее отправления. Первое отправление: сторона мыслительная с ее видами. Знание и наука. Нормальные отправления рассудка и пустое блуждание мыслей

You went inside, let's go there again. Look how many and varied actions and movements there are! Now one thing, now another, now in, now out, now accepted, now rejected, done and remade. For the soul is constantly moving and cannot stand on one thing. If we begin to look into the soul together, we will not be able to discern anything - we must divide its actions into categories and then consider each gender separately. Yes, they took a closer look a long time ago and divided all the actions of the soul into three categories - thoughts, desires and feelings, calling each a special side of the soul - thinking, desiring and feeling. Let's take this division and start looking at each side. The thinking side. If there is confusion within us, then it has the greatest scope in thoughts, while desires and feelings are disturbed already under the influence of thoughts. But in the category of thoughts, not everything is a disorderly movement; among them there are a number of serious activities. They, in fact, constitute the real work of mental life from the side of thoughts. These are the classes: 1. As soon as you notice something externally through your senses or listen to the story of others about what they noticed with their feelings, immediately all that imagination imagines and memory remembers, and nothing can enter the soul except imagination and memory. Then subsequent mental activity is based on imagination and memory. What your memory hasn’t preserved, you can’t imagine, you won’t even think about it. It happens that thoughts are born directly from the soul, but they too are immediately clothed in an image. So the thinking side of the soul is all figurative. 2. But imagination and memory extract and store only material for thoughts. The very movement of thoughts comes from the soul and is conducted according to its laws. Remember how your little brother, having seen some new thing, immediately turned to you or others with questions: “What is this? Who did it? What is this made of? - and did not calm down until all these issues were solved for him and he was satisfied. The mentality of the soul begins precisely with the generation of these questions and gives birth to thoughts in response to them or accepts thoughts already prepared about this from others. Imagination and memory do not think. They are unskilled laborers, under the yoke. The ability of the soul, from which such questions emanate and by which thoughts are sought and generated in response to them, is called reason, whose job is to reason, ponder and find the required solutions. Watch yourself - and you will find that you do nothing without thinking and consideration. Every little thing has to be discussed. No matter how instantly this is done, consideration enters everywhere and follows the previously mentioned questions. 3. When you think, there is no definite thought yet. A definite thought is established when you find a solution to any of the issues. Your mind keeps rummaging around, looking for what any thing is, where it comes from and what it is for, and so on. When you find such a solution yourself or, having heard it from others, agree with it, usually say: “Now I understand, there is nothing more to interpret, the matter is decided.” This decision gives peace to your thinking regarding the subject that occupied you. Then your mind turns to other objects, and the formed thought is handed over to the spiritual archive - memory, from where, at the request of need, it is taken as a tool for solving other issues, as a means for composing other thoughts. The totality of all the concepts formed in this way constitutes the image of your thoughts, which you discover in any case in your speeches. This is the area of ​​your knowledge, acquired by you through mental labor. The more questions you have resolved, the more definite thoughts or concepts you have about things; The more such concepts, the wider the circle of your knowledge. Thus, as you see, above memory and imagination you have reason, which, through its mental labor, obtains for you certain concepts or knowledge about things. We are not able to find a definite answer to every question. Most of them remain unresolved. They think and think, and come up with nothing definite. Why do they say: maybe this way, or maybe that way. This gives opinions and assumptions, of which in total we have no more than the amount of determined knowledge we have. When someone, discussing a certain class of objects, obtains himself and borrows from others so many specific thoughts and concepts about them, and manages to supplement what is unresolved in them with such successful opinions and assumptions that he can consider this circle of objects sufficiently known and understood, then he puts everything he has obtained in order, presents it in connection and consistency, and gives us a science about those objects. Science is the crown of the mental work of the mind. I am telling you all this so that it will be clearer to you what the natural, legitimate activity of our thinking power should consist of. She should have diligently discussed the unknown in order to know it. Very few people are given the opportunity to become scientists; not everyone can study science, but everyone can and should discuss the things around us in order to obtain certain concepts about them. This is what everyone’s thinking power should have been occupied with. How much she will get is judging by her strength, but she must always be busy with the serious business of thinking and discussing realities. Meanwhile, what do we see in our mental area? Continuous movement of images and ideas without any specific purpose or order. Thoughts after thoughts rise up and now go in a row, now cross each other, now run ahead, now return back, now run away to the side, without stopping at anything. This is not reasoning, but wandering and scattering of thoughts; Consequently, a state completely opposite to what our thinking power should be - a disease of it, so embedded in it and common to everyone that you will not find a single person who could constantly carry out the serious work of thinking without being subject to scattering and wandering of thoughts, separating him from his work and dragging him in different directions. We often wonder. What is this condition? Here's what: thought goes into the archive of memory and, with the help of imagination, sorts through all the collected rubbish there, moving from history to history according to the well-known laws of concatenation of ideas, weaving into the past the unprecedented, and often even the impossible, until it comes to its senses and returns to the surrounding reality. They say: deepened. He went deeper, but into emptiness, and not into a serious discussion of the matter. This is the same as sleepy daydreaming - idle thinking and empty thinking. Watch yourself - and you will see that most of our time passes in precisely this kind of idle thinking and wandering of thoughts. Some days (and isn’t there more like that) not a single serious thought will come to mind. I ask you to pay attention to this and begin to resolve the question: is it appropriate for an intelligent creature to act this way? Meanwhile, I will turn to other categories of mental activity. You might be interested in: