Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Alexander

Alexander’s line lands like a scalpel cut against a whole tradition of tidy mental bookkeeping. The “therefore” matters: he’s not tossing off a vibe, he’s closing an argument aimed at a fashionable assumption in early 20th-century psychology and philosophy - that every mental act comes pre-packaged with two ingredients: cognition (knowing, representing) and conation (willing, striving). His refusal is a strike at the comforting picture of the mind as a two-part machine, half camera, half engine.

The subtext is methodological. If you build your theory by stipulating that every act includes both a cognitive and a conative element, you’ve insulated yourself from counterexamples: perception becomes secretly desire-tainted, desire becomes stealthily knowledge-laden, and nothing can ever be “just” attending, or “just” wanting. Alexander is saying: stop laundering complexity into a universal template. Let distinctions bite. Some mental episodes may be primarily cognitive; others are conative through and through. Mixing them by default isn’t nuance - it’s a category error dressed up as depth.

Contextually, Alexander sits in an era trying to reconcile introspective psychology with more rigorous philosophical analysis, while his own metaphysical project (emergent evolution) pushes him to treat mind as layered and differentiated rather than reducible to a single formula. The sentence’s power is its austerity: he uses a mild “cannot” to do something aggressive - deny a reigning schema and force the reader to justify, not assume, the mind’s supposed internal dualism.