The trilogy of mind: cognition, affection and conation
Knowing, feeling and striving. For about two centuries, Western psychology divided the mind into these three faculties. The ICA's thinking, feeling and willing descend from that scheme.
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What the three faculties are
| Faculty | Plain meaning | In the ICA |
|---|---|---|
| Cognition | Knowing: perceiving, understanding, reasoning | Thinking (Integrative Synthesis and Systematic Analysis) |
| Affection | Feeling: emotion and the sense of pleasure or displeasure | Feeling (Social Attunement) |
| Conation | Striving: will, desire, the drive to act | Willing (Environmental Engagement) |
Conation is the least familiar of the three words. It names the striving side of the mind: wanting, intending and acting, as opposed to knowing or feeling.
Where it came from
The historian of psychology Ernest Hilgard traced the scheme in a 1980 paper whose title gave it its name, "the trilogy of mind". As his account is summarised by Kihlstrom (Berkeley), the line runs like this:
- Christian Wolff (1730s) divided the mind into two faculties, knowing and desiring.
- Moses Mendelssohn (1755) added feeling as a third.
- Immanuel Kant built his three Critiques (1781, 1788, 1790) around knowledge, desire and feeling, and treated the three faculties as irreducible.
- The Scottish school (Reid, Stewart, Hamilton) and later Alexander Bain (1855, 1859) carried the scheme into English-language psychology.
- William McDougall gave it its last major modern form.
It is a specific European, 18th-century formulation. Other traditions divide the mind differently, sometimes into two parts, sometimes into four or five; see the parallels across traditions.
How the ICA uses it
Rudolf Steiner later spoke of the same three as thinking, feeling and willing, and those are the ICA's faculty names. The ICA measures which you lead with, through four dimensions: two modes of thinking, one of feeling and one of willing. How the scoring works.
A long history is not evidence that a scheme is correct. The ICA is currently being studied; our research page sets out what is being tested.
Common questions
What is conation?
Conation is the striving part of mental life: will, desire, intention and the drive to act. With cognition (knowing) and affection (feeling), it makes up the trilogy of mind.
What are the three faculties of the mind?
In the trilogy of mind they are cognition (knowing), affection (feeling) and conation (striving). The ICA calls them thinking, feeling and willing.
Who named the trilogy of mind?
The phrase is from the title of Ernest Hilgard's 1980 paper, which traced the scheme from Wolff and Mendelssohn through Kant to 20th-century psychology.
Keep reading
Thinking, feeling, willing: the three faculties
Thinking, feeling and willing: where the three-part division of the mind comes from, from Plato and Kant to Steiner, and how the ICA measures each faculty.
Plato's tripartite soul: reason, spirit and appetite
Plato's tripartite soul in Republic IV: reason, spirit and appetite, how he argued for it, and how far it matches thinking, feeling and willing.
The four measured dimensions
Integrative Synthesis, Systematic Analysis, Social Attunement and Environmental Engagement: what each ICA dimension measures and which profiles it leads.
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