Mental function

“ In the first place, you will understand the bodily mechanism through which the mind operates, and a knowledge of this mechanism is bound to enlighten you as to the character of the mental processes themselves. ”

“ This is no place, and at present we have no need, for a psychological theory of the origin or of the causes of what is called activity, but as a fact, you have in your mental life a sort of consciousness accompanying the processes by which, as the psychologists are accustomed to say, you adjust your organism to its environment ”

“ Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thorough-going and complete. ”

“ When we speak of the 'mental' condition of a person, we refer to his senses, his perceptions, his consciousness, his ideas. If his mental condition is perfect, his will, his memory, his understanding are perfect, and connected with a healthy bodily organization. ”

“ For, as already shown, the study of psychology has evolved no more certain result than that there are uniformities of mental action which are so entirely conformable to those of bodily action as to indicate their intimate relation to a 'mechanism of thought and feeling,' acting under the like conditions with that of sense and motion. ”

“ We can call, for instance, into peculiar activity, the judgment, the memory, or the imagination, and note the differences in our mental condition as the one faculty or the other is more active. And this is an experiment. Over our mental sensations we have less power. We cannot at will feel angry, or envious, or frightened. ”

“ In proceeding to examine and compare the mental phenomena, the first circumstance that strikes us, prior to any attempt to arrange them in classes, is, that the mind which exhibits these is susceptible of a variety of feelings, every new feeling being a change of its state; and, indeed, it is by such changes alone that it manifests itself, either in our own consciousness, or in the actions of our fellow men. ”

“ Therefore are the spiritual and the material, the inner and the outer, human experiences always correlated with the mind function and conditioned, as to their conscious realization, by the mind activity. ”

“ Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our irresistible impulses to couple certain movements with the perception or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental structure, and like the necessary judgments, are interpreted by the apriorists and the empiricists in the same warring ways. ”

“ The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, and connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of our nervous structure. Our interests, our tendencies of attention, our motor impulses, the æsthetic, moral, and theoretic combinations we delight in, the extent of our power of apprehending schemes of relation, just like the elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all [Pg 689] grown up in ways of which at present we can give no account. ”

“ Similarly with most of our mental actions, they are compounds of feeling and intellect, and produced by many causes, such as hereditary tendency, acquired habit, internal and external mental excitants, dogmatic belief, knowledge of empirical rules, and occasionally of verified principles. Several of these causes also frequently conspire to produce a single idea or decision. ”

“ And, like all other mental or physical faculties, this faculty of observation will improve continually by being exercised, and add to the stature of the inner man, making him more complete. Besides, how immensely it will add to his enjoyment of life. ”

“ You have before you "sense-perceptions," "causal judgments," "classifying judgments," and "associated emotional qualities" or "feeling tones." Every suggested idea, every act of reasoning is in the last analysis the product of one or more of these elementary forms of mental activity.
We shall now go on to consider the operations of these mental processes in connection with certain mental phenomena.
Principles that Bear on Practical Affairs
Our purpose in all this is not to teach you the elements of psychology as it is ordinarily conceived or taught. ”

“ They are entirely taken up with these thoughts and feelings and acts of the will,—mental facts, in a word,—trying to tell us what they are, and to arrange them in classes, and tell us the circumstances or conditions under which they exist. It seems to me that it would be better to define psychology as the science of the experiences, phenomena, or facts of the mind, soul, or self—of mental facts, in a word. ”

“ It would be a mistake to conclude that because some of the theories advanced are very plausible, we have, therefore, reached definite truth with regard to the mechanics of the brain that underlie suggestion and mental influence. ”

“ It may be stated as a fundamental principle that the will can never originate any form of mental activity....’ But it has the power, he continues, of selecting any one out of several objects that present themselves either simultaneously or successively before the mental vision, and of so limiting and intensifying the impression which that particular object makes upon the consciousness, that all others shall be for the time non-existent to it. ”

“ To accomplish this analysis requires direct psychological study carried to a high pitch of perfection; it being necessary, among other things, to investigate the degree in which mental character is created by circumstances, since no one supposes that cerebral conformation does all, and circumstances nothing. ”

“ On the other hand, if it means in this central position of mental sciences a science which does not consider the inner life as an object, but as subjective activity needing to be interpreted and subjectively understood, not as to its elements, but as to its meaning, then we should have two kinds of psychology, one which explains and one which interprets. They would speak of different facts, the one of the inner life as objective content of consciousness, as phenomenon, the other of the inner life as subjective attitude, as purpose. ”

“ But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of objects present to the thought at any time ”

“ Thought moreover is simple, whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the elementary activities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneous or free, whilst all material activity is determined ab extra; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and appetites, which would be impossible were it a corporeal function. For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life must be both immaterial and simple as well as substantial, must be what is called a Soul. ”

“ And, just as Man is enabled to use elementary the physical qualities that he finds in his body, and to turn same to good account in living his human life, so does man, consciously, or unconsciously, make use of these elementary Mental powers in his everyday mental life. ”

“ Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology. ”

“ Yes, we know to-day that every mental act, that every psychological process is the absolutely necessary outcome of the given circumstances; that the functions of the cells in the cortex of the brain determine every decision and volition, and that man's deed is as necessary as the falling of the stone when its support is taken away. ”

“ In other words, the organs of sense and of those mental faculties which are directly occupied with the sensations, are the earliest to be developed, as we might naturally suppose would be the case; and, by consequence, the sensible properties of objects and the direct and immediate effects of any action, are those which have a controlling influence over the volitions of the mind during all the earlier periods of its development. ”

“ Even if we believe that emotions are complex facts, involving vague sensations as well as feelings, and that terms like emotion, memory, reasoning and will are names for classes of mental facts rather than for mental powers, it still remains important to distinguish between feeling, intellect and will, as well as to recognize the interdependence of the mental processes. ”

“ If we regard the human subject, in the ordinary psychological way, as a being whose conscious life runs parallel with the highest physical processes of his organism, we get a view of the relation between the intellect and the will which is far more just, at once to the natural history of the mind, and to the deeper meaning of the inner life of our consciousness. View man as a natural being, and you find him adjusting himself to his environment, acting, as they say, in response to stimuli. ”

“ Under the psychological come the qualitative and quantitative modifications of instincts, feelings, conceptions, and mental processes in general, which occur in creatures having more or less intelligence, when certain of their conditions are changed. ”

“ WE have now seen that, in what we call the mental world, Consciousness, there are three grand classes of phenomena, the most familiar of all the facts with which we are acquainted,—SENSATIONS, IDEAS, and the TRAIN OF IDEAS. We have examined a number of the more complicated cases of Consciousness ”

“ The general propositions applicable to all phases of psychological phenomena are here only briefly stated, leaving the minor, or subsidiary, propositions necessary for the elucidation of particular classes and sub-classes of phenomena to be stated under their appropriate heads.
The first proposition relates to the dual character of man's mental organization. That is to say, man has, or appears to have, two minds, each endowed with separate and distinct attributes and powers; each capable, under certain conditions, of independent action. ”

“ Some think they make the notion of it clearer by calling the mental state and the brain the inner and outer 'aspects,' respectively, of 'One and the Same Reality.' Others consider the mental state as the 'reaction' of a unitary being, the Soul, upon the multiple activities which the brain presents. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the mental state under examination neither resembles nor operates on any of the realities known to the psychologist, he calls it a subjective state pure and simple, possessed of no cognitive worth. ”

“ And, moreover, it is necessary, so long as such experiences have a strong hold on the popular imagination and shape the popular conceptions of the nature both of mental processes and of the field of psychology, to portray as well as may be the natural explanation and significance of the phenomena, and to indicate the general trend of the conceptions under which they may be profitably viewed ”

“ Every established mental condition is an acquired habit, and it has become such by continuous repetition of thought. Despondency and cheerfulness, anger and calmness, covetousness and generosity—indeed, all states of mind—are habits built up by choice, until they have become automatic. A thought constantly repeated at last becomes a fixed habit of the mind, and from such habits proceeds the life. ”

“ In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our motor habits,—habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.
You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. ”

“ This question has been solved in so far that psychologists produce artificial changes in the stimulations to the senses and in the arrangements of the objects and conditions existing about a person, and so secure changes also in his mental states. ”

“ Mental phenomena are not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily processes; but they lead to them a parte post. That they lead to acts is of course the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely mean acts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscular performances. ”

“ In fact, our mental life is nothing but a readjustment, of complex reactions. The poet finds recourse in his phantasies; the philosopher gives vent to his theoretical speculations; [348] the scientist resorts to his inventions and hypothetical theories; the well balanced, normal individual seeks readjustment in healthy activities,—art, literature, science, occupations, sport, etc., etc. ”

“ Of these great divisions of our subject, the Physiology of the Mind, or the consideration of the regular series of phenomena which it presents, simply as states or affections of the mind, is that to which we are first to turn our attention. ”

“ How these influences of the mind on the body are accomplished is a portion of that larger mystery of the influence of mind, or soul, or principle of life, on the material elements of which our body is composed. ”

“ But the species of mental equilibration to be more especially noted, is that shown in the establishment of a correspondence between relations among our states of consciousness and relations in the external world. Each outer connection of phenomena which we are capable of perceiving, generates, through accumulated experiences, an inner connection of mental states ”

“ Those that have physical causes and mental effects we should define as "sensations." Those that have mental causes and physical effects might perhaps be identified with what we call voluntary movements; but they do not concern us at present.
These definitions would have all the precision that could be desired if the distinction between physical and psychological causation were clear and sharp. As a matter of fact, however, this distinction is, as yet, by no means sharp. ”