Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander’s complaint is a philosopher’s version of calling out a category mistake: Locke, he suggests, smuggles a structural assumption into his theory of mind and then treats it as obvious. In Locke’s Essay, sensation delivers ideas from the world, while reflection delivers ideas from the mind’s own operations. That split is meant to be tidy, even democratic: two sources, same currency (ideas). Alexander’s “unfortunately” signals that the tidiness is the problem.

The subtext is that Locke reifies reflection. He talks as if “ideas of reflection” sit in the mind like mental marbles, available for inspection in the same way colors or sounds are. Alexander is pushing against the picture of an inner theater where attention simply turns from outer objects to inner objects. For Alexander, reflection is not a second shelf of things; it’s a mode, an activity, a way experience folds back on itself. Treating it as an “object of contemplation beside” sensation makes introspection look like just another perceptual pipeline, when it’s actually a shift in standpoint.

Context matters: Alexander is writing in the wake of late-19th and early-20th century pressure on British empiricism from idealism and the emerging psychology of attention and consciousness. Locke’s framework helped make knowledge feel secure by making mental contents discrete and inspectable. Alexander spots the cost: once reflection is turned into object-like “ideas,” you invite infinite regress (reflecting on reflection), and you blur the difference between having an experience and taking that experience as something to analyze. The line lands because it’s a small correction with large consequences: the architecture of the mind changes when “reflection” stops being a thing and becomes an act.