Читать книгу The Origin of Thought and Speech онлайн

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How many confused ideas traverse my brain in one day, and how seldom those come of which I follow the thread. We know well that injunction so often given by parents to children, and by schoolmasters to their pupils: “Try to concentrate your attention.” It almost seems as if that which we require of children is beyond my powers, for I have hardly resolved to disentangle a problem of whatever kind, when, under the form of useless, futile, inept thoughts, obstacles heap themselves across my path. I conclude from this that a fatal somnolence paralyses my faculties.

When a person has to be awakened who is disinclined to be disturbed, he is violently shaken. What movement would suffice to energise a man whose mental powers were drowsy? I do not see anything from the outside; and a personal effort could not be looked for, from an enervated will.

And yet I am possessed by the desire to penetrate the mystery of my existence; I ask myself what I am, and why I am on this earth; from the moment that I put this question to myself I feel that the awakening may be possible for me. I know two classes of men who never ask it; first those who do not see that there is any problem to solve; and secondly those who are content with infantine and superficial teaching; or more or less elaborate and learned, but coming from one who appears to himself to be the depository of a collection of supernaturally inspired truths. I own that I do not belong to the first of these divisions, since I shall have no rest as long as I am ignorant of what passes in me and around me; neither do I belong to the second of these classes, since those who compose it are content to believe; but faith is not knowledge, and I am anxious to comprehend what has been discovered, known, and established by evidence. But how shall I submit to this labour of research, when the habitual condition of my thoughts is to wander at will amongst my impressions, and when I am so incurably absent-minded?