Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Psychology, in Samuel Alexander's hands, is less a parlor game of hidden motives than a disciplined cartography project: map attention and conation the way a naturalist catalogs species. The sentence has the brisk confidence of early 20th-century philosophy trying to earn the right to speak in the register of science. “Such being the nature of mental life” is a power move: it smuggles in a whole metaphysics of mind as layered, structured, and lawlike, then treats that premise as settled enough to build a research program on top of it.

The key is the pairing of attention with conation. Attention isn’t just noticing; it’s selection, a spotlight that reveals what “counts” for a mind. Conation, the more old-fashioned term, signals striving, impulse, directed will. Put together, they describe mind as an engine of orientation and pursuit, not merely a mirror reflecting stimuli. Alexander’s intent is to shift psychology’s center of gravity away from introspective anecdotes or atomized sensations and toward the organized patterns of directedness: how mental life aims.

“Different levels” hints at his broader context: an emergentist worldview in which higher forms of mind arise from, but are not reducible to, lower ones. The subtext is methodological restraint with grand ambition. Psychology’s “business” is description, but not passive description; it’s the kind that quietly prepares explanation by stabilizing the shapes of experience across layers of complexity. In an era negotiating the borders between philosophy, physiology, and the new professional psychology, Alexander is staking a claim: start with how minds attend and strive, and you’ll have the blueprint for everything else.