The same tendency shows itself in our calling the ability of solving a mathematical problem, the ability to enjoy a piece of music, etc., certain states of the mind; we don't mean by this expression “conscious mental phenomena”. Rather, a state of the mind in this sense is the state of a hypothetical mechanism, a mind model meant to explain the conscious mental phenomena. (Such things as unconscious or subconscious mental states are features of the mind model.) In this way also we
65.
can hardly help conceiving of memory as of a kind of storehouse. Note also how sure people are that to the ability of adding or multiplying or to that of saying a poem by heart, etc., there must correspond a peculiar state of the person's brain, although on the other hand they know next to nothing about such psycho-physiological correspondences. We have an overwhelmingly strong tendency to conceive of the phenomena which in
these
such
cases we actually observe by the symbol of a mechanism whose manifestations these phenomena are; // We regard these phenomena as manifestations of this mechanism. // and their possibility is the particular construction of the mechanism itself.