Faculty

Use in the book

The contrast between thinking and expressing separates two powers that may be possessed unequally or fail to act together even in the same person. Pen, ink and paper distinguish equipment and material without providing a fixed anatomical map. The wise writer’s four faculties—taste, judgment, imagination and reason—must be consulted together and separately. The quoted rector followed by four faculties turns the mental word toward its academic sense. Memory then joins as secretary, clerk or writer, rolling the material until it acquires polish and finish. These are practical images of cooperation, not an exhaustive immutable list of human powers.

Places to read

1. II, p. 562, entry 2, ¶1Thinking and expression differ both in possession and in actual exercise.
2. II, p. 825, entry 8, ¶1Four mental faculties are compared to four academic faculties.
3. II, p. 825, entry 10, ¶1Memory joins the four as their figurative officeholder and finishing process.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves potentially, in act and in exercise. The faculty/academic-faculty comparison remains within one paired paragraph, not a separate Joubert entry. Calendered finish preserves the cloth-pressing image with almost qualifying it; the word is not changed into a generic improvement.

Use in the book

The plural permits Guérin to describe a self that is neither wholly strong nor wholly weak. Different powers develop at different rates, move in contrary directions, or fail to reach equilibrium. In June 1834 nature soothes the soul's surface while stimulating restless powers deeper within. Removal from society cannot by itself restore harmony when the inequalities belong partly to the person.

In July the faculties appear as sickly children suddenly grown vigorous. Their unexpected maturation creates a responsibility: caprice and accident must yield to purposeful exercise in the service of freedom. Growth is possible, but does not occur uniformly or follow an assured timetable.

In August, their communication with the outer world becomes the central issue. When the soul contracts, its most active messengers remain alive but imprisoned, turning their energy against one another and against their enclosure. In April 1835 the image changes to buds whose branches never emerged. The difference matters: obstructed power and absent power are not the same explanation of suffering.

This vocabulary keeps inward experience differentiated. A person may perceive deeply yet lack deductive assurance, feel intensely yet fail in action, rest bodily while mental life expands. “Faculties” gives those uneven combinations a name without resolving them into a unified theory.

Places to read

1. 26 June 1834 · ¶1Unequal intellectual and moral powers prevent equilibrium even under favorable outward conditions.
2. 16 July 1834 · ¶2Newly vigorous faculties require direction and exercise rather than continued government by chance.
3. 26 August 1834 · ¶1Communicating powers are confined without being extinguished, producing inward pressure and conflict.
4. 30 April 1835 · ¶2The unrealized branch becomes a different model: some powers seem barely indicated rather than merely blocked.

Translation in this edition

English “faculties” is close to the French, but “forces,” “puissance,” and “pouvoir” nearby should not be treated as fixed technical subdivisions. The April paragraph moves freely between the mind's faculties, forces, strong action, and remaining power.

Use in the book

Theophrastus extends the local-blend account beyond its named examples by saying the other faculties follow the same pattern. That sentence matters: the physiological theory is represented as generalizing from bodily constitution to differentiated capacities, rather than merely producing a single undifferentiated mental state.

His last objection asks how these capacities arise in each part through the blending of blood. The tongue and hands, he argues, are instruments; form would be a better causal explanation than a blend without intelligence. The dispute therefore distinguishes capacity, bodily condition, instrument, and cause. It also qualifies the modern commentary's declaration that Empedocles makes thought “not a faculty” but a fluid state. Whatever interpretive thesis one prefers, the testimony itself speaks of faculties and asks how their existence is explained.

Places to read

1. A 86 §§ 10–11 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 11. Generalizes the local-blend account to other faculties.
2. A 86 § 24 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 24. Questions whether blood-blending in parts explains their capacities.

Translation in this edition

“Faculty” is a translation of the reporter's general capacity-word. Avoid making it either a disembodied entity or a modern modular cognitive architecture absent from the passage.

Use in the book

A power, its operation and its bearer

Burton’s preliminary anatomy is meant to explain the body and soul before their disorders are discussed. A faculty is therefore a working term, not merely a decorative scholastic label. The common division gives the soul three principal faculties, vegetal, sensitive and rational. Nutrition, growth and generation belong to the first; apprehension and movement divide the sensitive level; understanding and will are the rational soul’s two chief parts, differing in office rather than essence. The categories may be nested: attraction is a ministering faculty within nutrition, itself a vegetative operation. The word consequently does not guarantee one fixed level in a universal classification.

The distinction between one soul with three faculties and three separate souls is itself disputed in Burton’s account. He reports further alternatives before adopting an inclusive rational soul in his working exposition. Naming powers does not settle the metaphysical question of how many substances possess them. Likewise, a power differs from the organ through which it works. Imagination’s organ is placed in a chamber of the brain; the moving faculty uses spirits, nerves, muscles and tendons. An organ can be damaged or obstructed, and its impairment can hinder the faculty’s operation.

Estimation and thought under imagination

Burton calls imagination an inward sense which some name “Æstimative” or “Cogitative.” The first concerns estimation or appraisal, the second thought. His “some call” marks a reported terminological grouping; it does not establish that every philosophical writer uses these labels interchangeably. In this passage they belong to a capacity that receives common sense’s forms, examines them further, retains and recalls them, and invents new ones through comparison. The parenthetical appeal to Fernel connects its strengthening with frequent meditation, meaning sustained reflection.

That faculty operates in artistic invention as well as melancholy. Poets’ fictions and painters’ designs exemplify its force, while a frightening object presented through common sense or memory may stir it harmfully. Reason should govern imagination in humans; Burton’s qualification “or at least should be” distinguishes the prescribed relation from actual government. In the general account of will, natural and vegetative powers are outside voluntary command, while other lower powers can obey or rebel. Capacity, rightful authority and successful exercise are separate questions.

Particular impairment and wider disturbance

The dispute over melancholy asks which faculty is affected. One position assigns the fault to imagination alone. Another objects that reason should correct an impossible conviction if it is fully sound. Burton’s settlement gives an order and condition: impairment begins in imagination and reaches reason when the disease becomes established or prolonged. He then records the formulation that belief, opinion and reasoning are injured indirectly through imagination’s defect. “Faculty” makes it possible to distinguish these operations without assuming either that all must be equally damaged or that their interactions are irrelevant.

In erotic melancholy, “æstimativæ virtutis” names the estimative power whose faulty judgment gives rise to intense desire. The appraisal concerns the perceived or imagined object’s desirability. Here Latin “virtutis” means power or faculty, rather than moral excellence. The preceding qualification says that both imagination and reason are affected if the passion is violent or the disease long established, first one and then the other; the closing Latin should not erase that sequence.

The later comet comparison gives a striking example of circumscribed impairment. Burton describes religious enthusiasts who seem intelligent, converse coherently and possess strong intellects in other matters, yet have an injured imagination on the subject of their enthusiasm. They resemble comets, round except where they blaze. “Læsam habent imaginationem” means that their imagination is impaired. This is Burton’s historical medical and sectarian classification of the people he attacks, not a diagnosis independently established by the reader.

Other passages use a deliberately comprehensive scope. Superstition affects brain, heart, will, understanding, soul and all its faculties; despair likewise affects the whole soul and displaces hope and confidence with fear and sorrow. Those descriptions should not be erased to make the circumscribed comet model universal. They concern different stretches of Burton’s argument and different claims about the extent of disturbance.

Near the end, the exhaustion of faculties becomes an argument for hope. A sick person loses appetite, strength, sight, hearing and effective use of the limbs, yet nature remains hidden and may recover. Burton applies the analogy to a spiritually distressed reader who believes prayer, hope and repentance impossible. The comparison supports possible recovery even when a power cannot presently be felt or exercised. It does not promise an automatic outcome, and its account of evacuations remains part of historical medicine.

Skills, resources and efficacy

The marginal quotation ascribed to Scaliger contrasts permission to write with ability: everyone has liberty, but few have “facultas.” The body’s English restatement preserves the distinction. The writer’s capacity is at issue, not the legal or social permission to exercise it. The surrounding attack on vain and unlearned authors gives the contrast its polemical force.

The word extends beyond this psychology. Earlier rulers, Burton says, were excellent “in all faculties”: the surrounding list of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry and other studies makes the phrase refer to fields of learning. The eloquent Italian women praised by Giovio have an excellent faculty for captivating speech, a cultivated accomplishment in Burton’s account of attraction. Neither use names a separate soul-substance.

The gambling discussion adds a financial sense. In the original margin, “exhaustisque facultatibus” means that the gamblers’ resources have been exhausted; the same sentence speaks of squandered inheritance and ensuing poverty. These are means or property, not impaired mental powers. The paired body likewise describes spent means and consumed patrimonies, but does not itself print the Latin form. The precise source of this marginal passage remains unresolved in the supplied edition.

The Latin contrast “Non deerat voluntas sed facultas” says that the will was not lacking but the means were. Burton has just suggested that poverty and melancholy may keep people from wrongdoing. The joke concerns inability or lack of opportunity to carry out an inclination; it is not the anatomy’s opposition of two named faculties. Conversely, “monstrosâ facultate” describes the prodigious power attributed to the Peruvian plant chamico. Here the bearer of efficacy is a substance, not a human subject. The unverified plant identity and historical therapeutic claim should remain separate from the lexical meaning “power.”

Related entries

Soul; Animal and vegetal; Animal faculties; Common sense; Imagination; Intellect; Memory and recollection; Will and nill; Reason

Places to read

1. Permission and ability to writeFacultas contrasts with liberty
2. Why an anatomy of powers is neededTechnical language as preparation for the medical work
3. Principal and subordinate facultiesCompeting soul divisions, ministering powers, estimative and cogitative imagination, and bodily execution
4. Rational powers and voluntary limitsUnderstanding and will, rebellious appetite, and vegetative functions outside voluntary government
5. Which power is injured?Imagination, reason, sequence, duration and indirect impairment
6. An impaired organ and its facultyPhysical obstruction hindering imagination
7. Faculties as learned fieldsOccupational studies and the learning of rulers
8. Exhausted financial resourcesThe marginal facultatibus belongs to gambling losses, inheritance and poverty
9. Will without means; a substance’s powerThe Latin resource sense and herbal efficacy
10. Faulty estimation in loveImpaired appraisal and the conditional sequence from imagination to reason
11. A cultivated accomplishmentSpeech, wit and gesture as powers of attraction
12. Whole or circumscribed disturbanceSuperstition, the comet comparison and despair
13. Powers temporarily exhaustedBodily recovery as an analogy for possible spiritual recovery

In this edition

The modern rendering retains “faculty” where it serves the technical account. In “the estimative or cogitative faculty,” the final noun is supplied to explain the original’s adjectives; it is not an additional separately printed noun at that position. “This faculty is free” is retained in the sleep description. The Latin becomes “their imagination is impaired,” preserving the specified power and the local claim of injury.

In the original margins, “facultas” becomes “ability”, while “facultatibus” becomes “resources”. These are editorial translations attached to the historical quotations, separately checked from the modern body’s restatements.

Elsewhere the translations vary with the sense: “excellent in all faculties” becomes “accomplished in every field”; the excellent faculty in speech becomes excellence “in this art”; “facultas” becomes “the means”; and “monstrosâ facultate” becomes “of prodigious power.” The wider article therefore retains the technical focus without turning a locally appropriate definition into an exclusive whole-book meaning.

cogitative

Printed “Cogitative” (English learned adjective).

Citation key, Modern rendering, Modern wording: cogitative

Printed form, Original wording: Cogitative

A power of thought grouped here under imagination.

Context: Some call marks an attributed terminology.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: which some call Æstimative, or Cogitative

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned component is separate from the checked clause supplied as construction context.

Supplied words: faculty is supplied as a head noun in this construction

Modern construction: which some call the estimative or cogitative faculty

estimative

Printed “Æstimative” (English learned adjective).

Citation key, Modern rendering, Modern wording: estimative

Printed form, Original wording: Æstimative

A power of estimation or appraisal grouped here under imagination.

Context: Some call marks an attributed terminology, not a universal synonym rule.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: which some call Æstimative, or Cogitative

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned component is separate from the checked clause supplied as construction context.

Supplied words: faculty is supplied as a head noun in this construction

Modern construction: which some call the estimative or cogitative faculty

estimative power

Printed “æstimativæ virtutis” (Latin genitive phrase).

Printed form, Original wording: æstimativæ virtutis

Of the power of estimation or appraisal; its faulty judgment is given as the source of intense desire.

Context: Closing Latin in the erotic-melancholy definition; preceding passage conditions combined injury of imagination and reason on violence or duration.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: ex corrupto judicio æstimativæ virtutis

Modern rendering, Modern wording: of the estimative faculty

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned lexical component is separate from the supplied construction context.

Modern construction: from a faulty judgement of the estimative faculty

exhaustis facultatibus

Printed “exhaustisque facultatibus” (Latin).

Printed form, Original wording: exhaustisque facultatibus

Resources exhausted, an ablative-absolute circumstance leading into reduced poverty; -que is and.

Context: Financial loss, not exhaustion of mental faculties; the following consequence is poverty.

Source: Burton original marginal quotation

Source wording, Original construction: exhaustisque facultatibus, ad inopiam redigantur.

Modern rendering, Modern wording: and, their resources exhausted

Alignment convention

Qualification: Original Latin component and editorial English component are separately aligned; wider constructions are retained as context.

Modern construction: and, their resources exhausted, are reduced to poverty.

Notes: The complete mixed note was consulted, but only its original Latin is used as lexical attestation.

Translation layer: Editorial translation within the supplied Burton-labelled note; not original marginal wording and not paired modern body

facultas · local use 1

Printed “facultas” (Latin).

Citation key, Printed form, Original wording: facultas

Means, ability or opportunity to carry out an inclination.

Context: Burton’s aphorism after the joke that poverty and melancholy can prevent wrongdoing.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: Non deerat voluntas sed facultas.

Modern rendering, Modern wording: means

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned component is separate from the checked clause supplied as construction context.

Modern construction: The will was not lacking, but the means were.

facultas · facultate

Printed “facultate” (Latin ablative singular).

Printed form, Original wording: facultate

Power or efficacy attributed to the plant chamico.

Context: Historical herbal description; lexical meaning does not verify identification or efficacy.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: monstrosâ facultate

Modern rendering, Modern wording: power

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned component is separate from the checked clause supplied as construction context.

Modern construction: of prodigious power

facultas · local use 2

Printed “facultas” (Latin).

Citation key, Printed form, Original wording: facultas

Ability to write, contrasted with permission to do so.

Context: Scaliger quotation; contrast belongs to polemic about poor authors; exact letter remains uncollated.

Source: Burton original marginal quotation

Source wording, Original construction: in regno Franciæ omnibus scribendi datur libertas, paucis facultas.

Modern rendering, Modern wording: ability

Alignment convention

Qualification: Original Latin component and editorial English component are separately aligned; wider constructions are retained as context.

Modern construction: in the kingdom of France everyone is allowed to write, but few have the ability.

Notes: The complete mixed note was consulted, but only its original Latin is used as lexical attestation.

Translation layer: Editorial translation within the supplied Burton-labelled note; not original marginal wording and not paired modern body

facultas (plural facultates)

Printed “facultatibus” (Latin).

Printed form, Original wording: facultatibus

Financial resources or property consumed through habitual gambling.

Context: Historical margin adjoining Burton’s gambling critique; exact source unresolved, so no unqualified attribution to Daneau.

Source: Burton original marginal quotation

Source wording, Original construction: exhaustisque facultatibus, ad inopiam redigantur.

Modern rendering, Modern wording: resources

Alignment convention

Qualification: Original Latin component and editorial English component are separately aligned; wider constructions are retained as context.

Modern construction: their resources exhausted, are reduced to poverty.

Notes: The complete mixed note was consulted, but only its original Latin is used as lexical attestation.

Translation layer: Editorial translation within the supplied Burton-labelled note; not original marginal wording and not paired modern body

faculty · local use 1

Printed “faculty” (English).

Power or capacity, here imagination operating freely during sleep.

Context: Burton’s local faculty psychology, not a university body.

Source: original body

Source wording: In time of sleep this faculty is free

faculty · faculties · local use 1

Printed “faculties” (English).

Principal powers of soul; levels include lower powers.

Context: Burton gives the common division while reporting disagreement about substances and connection.

Source: original body

Source wording: three principall faculties, Vegetal, Sensitive, and Rational

faculty · faculties · local use 2

Printed “faculties” (English).

Printed form, Original wording: faculties

Fields or branches of learning, in praise of earlier rulers.

Context: Burton rebukes the unlearned gentry through a contrast with learned rulers.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: excellent in all faculties

Modern rendering, Modern wording: field

Alignment convention

Qualification: Plural faculties occurs inside all faculties; modern every field uses a singular component.

Modern construction: accomplished in every field

faculty · local use 2

Printed “faculty” (English).

Accomplishment in captivating speech and cultivated attraction.

Context: Giovio’s praise reported by Burton, not a distinct soul-substance.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: an excellent faculty in this kind

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: excelling in this art

Alignment convention

Qualification: The modern clause recasts the expression as excelling in this art; no one-word equivalent for faculty is claimed.

faculty · faculties · local use 3

Printed “faculties” (English).

Powers exhausted during bodily illness; used as an analogy for potential spiritual recovery.

Context: A sick person is the bodily example; the following paragraph applies it to spiritual distress.

Source: original body

Source wording: all his faculties are spent

læsam habent imaginationem

Printed “læsam habent imaginationem” (Latin phrase).

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: læsam habent imaginationem

They have an impaired imagination: a circumscribed injury compatible with coherent thinking in other matters in Burton’s account.

Context: Burton’s medical-sectarian judgment of religious enthusiasts; not a verified modern diagnosis.

Source: original body

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: their imagination is impaired

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned component is separate from the checked clause supplied as construction context.

monstrosâ facultate

Printed “monstrosâ facultate” (Latin phrase).

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: monstrosâ facultate

Of prodigious power; monstrosâ supplies the exceptional degree.

Context: Attribute of the named plant in Burton’s herbal catalogue.

Source: original body

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: of prodigious power

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned component is separate from the checked clause supplied as construction context.

Non deerat voluntas sed facultas

Printed “Non deerat voluntas sed facultas” (Latin).

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording, Original wording, Original construction: Non deerat voluntas sed facultas

The will was present but the means to act were absent; the full contrast, with its negation and exception, is a sentence rather than the meaning of facultas alone.

Context: Burton’s aphorism after the joke that poverty and melancholy can prevent wrongdoing.

Source: original body

Modern rendering, Modern wording, Modern construction: The will was not lacking, but the means were

Alignment convention

Qualification: Displayed phrase has its own explained lookup record, separate from the component record(s).

virtus

Printed “virtutis” (Latin genitive singular).

Printed form, Original wording: virtutis

Power or faculty, not moral excellence, qualified as estimative.

Context: The power appraises desirability.

Source: original body

Source wording, Original construction: æstimativæ virtutis

Modern rendering, Modern wording: faculty

Alignment convention

Qualification: The aligned lexical component is separate from the supplied construction context.

Modern construction: of the estimative faculty