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"For me I persist in looking to facts rather than to words official or unofficial, and in repeating that, 'whereas we were bound, now we are free. "'I think, therefore, I am. Cogito, ergo sum, was, you know, an old formula. And how did that happen? Could it have happened previous to the French intervention? And could it happen now if France used the power she has in Italy against Italy?
If at the foundation of our pure rational cognition of thinking beings there lay more than the mere Cogito if we could likewise call in aid observations on the play of our thoughts, and the thence derived natural laws of the thinking self, there would arise an empirical psychology which would be a kind of physiology of the internal sense and might possibly be capable of explaining the phenomena of that sense.
Even so all things were made by the word, and the word was in the beginning. Thought, reason that is, living language is an inheritance, and the solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as absurd as the ego of Descartes. The real and concrete truth, not the methodical and ideal, is: homo sum, ergo cogito. To feel oneself a man is more immediate than to think.
The twelfth century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated 'Cogito, ergo sum. Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old and familiar as St.
Moreover, the Ego, I, myself, as Will, as a continuously identic intelligent agent, am not given to myself immediately in my Presentment, any more than is the real object. The existence of my Ego, of my cogitant self, is an inference which I am compelled to draw from the facts of my mental activity. Cogito, ergo sum.
We are all willing to admit that other people are thoughtless. But when it comes to ourselves, we feel convinced that we can actually perceive our own thinking. "Cogito, ergo sum" would be regarded by most people as having a true premiss. This, however, the behaviourist denies. He maintains that our knowledge of ourselves is no different in kind from our knowledge of other people.
What we shall term return to the immediate, the primitive, the pure fact, will be the taking of each perception considered as an act lived, a coloured moment of the Cogito, and this will be for us a criterion and departure-point. Let us specify this point.
If philosophers of the Cartesian school had taken to heart, as the German transcendentalists did, the cogito ergo sum of their master, and had considered that a physical world is, for knowledge, nothing but an instrument to explain sensations and their order, they might have expected this collapse of half their metaphysics at the approach of their positive science: for if mental existence was to be kept standing only by its supposed causal efficacy nothing could prevent the whole world from becoming presently a bête-machine.
They had taken a long ramble through the woods that morning, and Egerton and Elsie had some ten minutes before sat down here to rest and wait for their companions, who had wandered a little from the path they were pursuing. "Cogito, ergo sum," she answered gayly, "Also I am sure we have had a very pleasant walk. But isn't it time we were moving toward home?"
We cannot fancy we are glad when we are not glad, or sorry when we are not sorry, or hopeful when in despair; and to pretend that we can possibly be conscious of willing when we are not willing, would be as absurd as to meet the cogito, ergo sum of Descartes, with the reply that, perhaps, we do not really think, but only think we think.
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