Concept

Mind

Overview

combination of cognitive faculties that provides consciousness, thinking, reasoning, perception, and judgement in humans and potentially other life forms

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Mind is discussed.

The power of thinking is called the UNDERSTANDING, and the power of volition is called the WILL; and these two powers or abilities in the mind are denominated faculties. Of some of the MODES of these simple ideas of reflection, such as are REMEMBRANCE, DISCERNING, REASONING, JUDGING, KNOWLEDGE, FAITH, &c., I shall have occasion to speak hereafter.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1
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in the soul as a physical mode, and in consciousness itself as a separately existent object of that consciousness. This, however, is not an arbitrary abstraction by the psychologist. Mind is just this elevation above nature and physical modes, and above the complication with an external object—in one word, above the material, as its concept has just shown. All it has now to do is to realise this notion of its…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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But we have ideas of the modifications of a body; therefore the object of the idea constituting the human mind is a body, and that, too, actually existing. Again, if there were also any other object of the mind besides a body, since nothing exists from which some effect does not follow, the idea of some effort produced by this object would necessarily exist in our mind.
Benedictus de Spinoza, The Philosophy of Spinoza
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But it would be arbitrary to say that there are no “mental” events except percepts, and yet it is difficult to find any principle by which we can decide what other events should be included. Perhaps the most essential characteristics of mind are introspection and memory. But memory in some of its forms is, as we have seen, a consequence of the law of conditioned reflexes, which is at least as much physiological as…
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
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The human mind, as we have seen, is the mind predominant in a certain system of 'minds', viz. in those which constitute the members of the human body. If we call it predominant, we mean that its system of ideas is more developed than theirs, so that there are more points in which each of them conforms to it than in which it conforms to any one of them.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
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