Mental process

“ Something peculiar is imparted to it, from the very circumstance of its being an action of our own. In anticipating an action of our own, we necessarily anticipate the mental processes, which are its antecedents. ”

“ All psychical phenomena are explicable by the relation of impression and power, and by the flow of movable elements; the whole process of mental development is nothing but the result of the action and interaction of the above simple laws. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such acts would appear to lie beyond the category of purely instinctive processes, since they appear to involve an adaptation of faculties to special cases, and result in special actions being instituted, and thus bear some resem blance to what we familiarly see involved in the process of reasoning characteristic of man's mental powers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ Either we might start from the various mental processes and ask for what end each mental factor can be practically useful and important, or we can begin with studying what significant ends are acknowledged in our society and then we can seek the various psychological facts which are needed as means for the realization of these ends. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus the ideas of mind and matter, of subject and object, of the Ego and external world are really evolved from the aggregation of our mental state which are the only realities so far as we are concerned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Consequently, when, at the outset of these discussions, we pointed out the element of will in the constitution of ideas, we were dwelling upon precisely what for the psychologist appears as the intimate connection between the knowing process of the mind and the motor responses of the organism to its environment. When we know, we have in the first place present to our minds certain contents, certain data, certain facts, it may be of the outer senses, it may be of the memory and the imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I perceive any object directly, without sophisticating myself by devising psychological hypotheses about the process, what I am aware of is, on the one side, the thing as a constituent of my environment, and, on the other, a variety of movements or impulses to movement in myself, marked by a peculiar tone of satisfied or dissatisfied feeling, and determined by the relation in which the thing in question stands to my various interests. ”

“ But if, with reference to the scientific value of this popular view, we turn to psychology for advice, we find at the present time, in that science, decidedly opposed interpretations of the sense in which the human will can be regarded as a cause. According to one of these interpretations the word “act” is properly to be applied merely to the physical process by which our organism gets adjusted to its environment. ”

“ Mind, as conditioned by a nervous substratum and unfolding with it—the genesis of the psychical faculties in all grades of organic manifestation—the law of mental progression from the lowest to the highest animate creatures—these were the problems that absorbed his attention. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leaving out of view the Will, which is a simple homogeneous mental state, forming the link between feeling and action, and not admitting of subdivisions; our states of consciousness fall into two great classes—Cognitions and Feelings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

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

“ 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 hypothesis of faculties ... must be regarded as productive of much error in psychology. It has led to the false supposition that mental activity, instead of being one and the same throughout its manifold phases, is a juxtaposition of totally distinct activities, answering to a bundle of detached powers, somehow standing side by side, and exerting no influence on one another. ”

“ Method to be pursued.—In treating of this department of mental activity, it will be our first business, then, to point out the well established and evident facts pertaining to the matter in hand, viewed simply as psychological phenomena, as modes in which the human mind manifests itself in action, according to the laws of its constitution. ”

“ The dependence of all the higher forms of mental activity upon sensations is recognized by psychologists and is easily [pg 341] demonstrated by a study of the manner in which we acquire knowledge. "Without sensation there can be no thought." ”

“ Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given object comes to prevail stably in the mind. Where thoughts prevail without effort, we have sufficiently studied in the several chapters on sensation, association, and attention, the laws of their advent before consciousness and of their stay. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not only do the feelings share with the intellectual processes in making up our mental life as a whole, but they also show themselves in certain bodily changes, which are so important that we shall return to them at greater length in the next chapter. ”

“ Now the finite process, whereby our own consciousness passes from an indeterminate to a relatively determinate state of purpose, of intention, of seeking for contents, is known to us in its psychological manifestations as a process of Selective Attention, growing more and more definite as it proceeds. ”

“ It is because they are in their proper and almost inextricable entanglement with our individual or temperamental functions, absolutely essential elements of all our rationality, of all our mental developments, of all our worth as thinkers, as workers or as producers ”

“ We frequently appear to mentally adapt ourselves to particular circumstances when we are really determined by causes; and this apparent adaptation is also seen in ordinary physical and chemical phenomena. ”

“ For our conscious volition implies that we know what we will. In consequence of these obvious considerations, a more modern psychology has been led to its well-known doctrine that all such psychological divisions are rather distinctions between different aspects of the same process, than means for telling us of naturally sundered or even of separable processes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For they mean nothing more or less than that habits formed in process of exercising biological aptitudes are the sole agents of observation, recollection, foresight and judgment: a mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs these operations is a myth. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”