Principles and aims of the New Atlantis Foundation

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the three functions of willing, thinking and feeling. We acknowledge them as distinct by giving them separate names, but in their operation they are inextricably connected with one another and we cannot in practice always distinguish them. Between them they cover all the activities of the human psyche. Each of the three operates by its own principles — one might say by a logic of its Own.

There is a clear correspondence between the three psychic functions of man and the three physical functions. The metabolic system is what ultimately gives power to my body just as my willing gives the power to my decisions. Both the metabolic system, when it is functioning properly, and willing are wholly unconscious. I am conscious of the mental decision to lift my arm, but not of the actual willing process by which I do it. Between the nervous system, centred in the head, and thinking, the correspondence is obvious. Finally my emotions, which are often felt as desire, are the reflections of my unconscious willing in my consciousness, and are thus in a sense the relating together of my willing and my thinking. In the same way the respiratory and circulatory system relates the metabolic and nervous systems by distributing the energy produced in the metabolic system throughout the body, and in particular to the nervous system and brain.

In the Book of Genesis it is written that God created man in his own image. It serves no good purpose to argue that it was really man who made God in his image, because both can be equally true. The image obviously does not mean physical shape, although in the days when men made gods in their own image it was so, but must be understood in a profounder sense. It appears that it should be understood in terms of the system of relationships between the three major functions. The nature of the God of Christianity is precisely described in the Athanasian Creed, and it is directly demonstrable from our experience that this also describes the nature of Man. It is easiest to make the comparison with man’s psychic organism, but from the analogy which has been shown between the two it is clear that it could equally well be made with the physical organism.

My willing, thinking and feeling together make up the whole of my subjectivity. They are ‘I’. There is in my experience no other ‘I’ which transcends the unity of these three. As Immanuel Kant showed, we have no possible grounds for maintaining that we know of the existence of any transcendent ego which exists objectively in its own right apart from my subjectivity, for the ego or ‘I’ — is my subjectivity, and thus neither I nor anyone else can experience it