Psychical research

“ And while these comparisons do not furnish a complete parallel to the relation that seems to pertain between Psychology and Psychical Research, yet it is as true in the one case as in the others, that the differentiation of a group of problems on the basis of unusualness of occurrence, of mysteriousness of origin, of doubtful authenticity, or of apparent paradoxical or transcendent character, is as illogical as it is unnecessary. The legitimate problems of Psychical [54] Research are equally and necessarily genuine problems of Psychology, that require no special designation. ”

“ We are all rational only in spots; and many a "psychical researcher" pursues some of his investigations under the guidance of a scientifically psychological interest, while in other directions the occult interest takes the helm. The analysis of the contrast between the two may be helpful in realizing more fully the divergences of Psychology and Psychical Research. ”

“ Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favour on some such “pan-psychic” view of the universe as this.’ (W. James, The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher, in The American Magazine, October 1909) . ”

“ It forms affiliations with physiology and biology and medicine, with philosophy and logic and ethics, with anthropology and sociology and folk-lore; it borrows freely from their materials, and attempts to interpret the materials thus borrowed from the psychological point of view and to infuse into them its distinctive spirit. Surely Psychical Research should be able to find a nook in so commodious a home ”

“ Before any of the more complex and complicated disorders of the mind can be understood, it will be necessary for us to discuss very briefly the nature of the subconscious mind—since it is upon this that all modern researches have in a great measure rested—upon the improved understanding of its nature that many of these cures rest. ”

“ Consciousness and Will, enter into all psychological phenomena such as Hypnotism and Mediumship, and into every form of mental alienation, insanity, obsession and the like.
Moreover, by building out of mental phenomena a distinct entity—largely independent of the self-conscious Intelligence, and almost equally so with consciousness—our “philosophies,” “metaphysics,” and explanations have become as confused and unreliable as the psychical phenomenon itself. ”

“ Psychological pertains to the empirical data of consciousness, (thoughts, ideas, sensations, etc.) while psychical pertains to the inner or ultimate nature of these data. Though the data as given in consciousness are psychical, that which is psychical may not be solely manifested as psychological phenomena. It may be manifested as physical phenomena and perhaps be identified with the energy of the universe. ”

“ Whatever conclusions an ultimate criticism may come to about mental states, they form a practically admitted sort of object whose habits of coexistence and succession and relations with organic conditions form an entirely definite subject of research. Cannot philosophers and biologists both become 'psychologists' on this common basis? Cannot both forego ulterior inquiries, and agree that, provisionally at least, the mental state shall be the ultimate datum so far as 'psychology' cares to go? ”

“ And just as there is thus a physical psychology, so [p.095] in like manner there is a psychological or epistemological physics, which in its turn is concerned with the indirections, or doors in the panelling, present in all the psychical sciences, for those very physical things quantity and matter. The devil will have his due; even an optimistic theology has to recognize him. And psychology has a sensuous self, the self of the purely sensuous consciousness, which has always involved it in a curious psychical atomism, a projection, in a word, of the physical on the plane of the psychical. ”

“ Then, starting afresh from that conception of life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism to outer relations in the environment,—a conception of which he made such brilliant use in his "Principles of Biology,"—he shows how the psychical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of adjustments or correspondences, and how the development of psychical life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration of such correspondences. ”

“ It is obvious to the reader, who has followed our discussion so far, that nothing can be discovered in such experiments, where the most complicated psychical processes are investigated directly and without any further preparation. We need first of all a careful analysis of the more elementary psychical processes, of the facts of attention and of the wider scope of consciousness as well as of the relations between them and of the manifold affective processes that intervene in all these cases. ”

“ And to-day, though none of us has any knowledge of the end of psychical phenomena in his own case, yet from all the marks by which we recognize such phenomena in our fellow-creatures, whether brute or human, we are taught that when certain material processes have been gradually or suddenly brought to an end, psychical phenomena are no longer manifested. From first to last, therefore, our appeal to experience gets but one response. ”

“ The supreme importance of pathological research holds especially true in the case of psychology, where the phenomena and the conditions on which these depend are so highly complex and so intricate, appearing at the same time so simple and taken as a matter of course in ordinary life.
As we have pointed out in the investigation of mental life we may either change the psychic or objective content, or effect changes in the mental function itself. In the study of vision, for instance, we may effect changes in the conditions of external objects, leaving the eye itself undisturbed. ”

“ While on the one hand there is danger that psychology, dealing with mind, experience, knowledge, is apt to fall into epistemological and metaphysical pitfalls, on the other hand there is grave danger on the side of physiologists and biologists to identify psychic facts with physiological and biological facts. ”

“ We can also study the capabilities and limitations of the subconscious in carrying on intelligent operations below the threshold of consciousness. Again, we can investigate the phenomena of this kind as met with in the course of clinical observations, and by technical methods of research explore the subconscious and thus explicitly reveal the process underlying and inducing the phenomena. By such methods of investigation the subconscious has been removed from the field of speculative psychology, and placed in the field of experimental research. ”

“ The psychic process is the highest stage in the evolution of life, and as such should be studied not by the instruments of mechanics and chemistry, but by the methods of biology. In addition to the concept of efficient causation, psychology even more than biology, should also work with the concepts of unity, synthesis, and purpose. ”

“ To me it is only such an hypothesis designed, like all hypotheses, to stimulate inquiry and help us in our practice, while we are groping our way towards the truth concerning the nature of mental disorder. ”

“ In concrete science consciousness is drowned in the object, in psychology, on the contrary, the object is drowned in consciousness. The chemist, the physicist, who will turn his attention to consciousness and introduce his psychic states, his moods, dispositions, and intentions as elements into his investigations will hardly be an exact scientist. Not so with the psychologist, he must take the inner world into account, he must deal with consciousness, with moods, with feelings. ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ But the psychological method has obvious and inherent limitations. Like any other natural science, psychology is limited to description and causal explanation of the phenomena of its special field, which in this case is states of consciousness. ”

“ The psychologist in order to succeed and obtain more efficient and valuable results must keep in mind clearly the fact that the psychic process is a form of life in general, its phenomena are naturally related to the province of biology, and that of the highest part of it. The methods of psychological investigation must follow the line not of the physical, but of the biological sciences. ”

“ While they should be used for the sake of a better elucidation of the facts, it is not good scientific sense to sacrifice to them the very material of the science of psychology. Sensations, ideas, feelings, emotions, are after all the direct data of the psychologist, while physiological processes and currents are purely hypothetical. ”

“ This book, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychology when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain, can go no farther—can go no farther, that is, as a natural science. If she goes farther she becomes metaphysical. All attempts to explain our phenomenally given thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities (whether the latter be named 'Soul,' 'Transcendental Ego,' 'Ideas,' or 'Elementary Units of Consciousness') are metaphysical. ”

“ For instance, we can prescribe a conflict between the subconsciousness and the personal consciousness, between a subconscious wish and a conscious wish, or volition, and observe the resultant mental and physical behavior, which may be inhibition of thought, hallucinations, amnesia, motor phenomena, etc. The possibilities and limitations of subconscious influences can in this way be experimentally studied. Subconscious personalities, therefore, afford a valuable means for studying the mechanism of the mind. ”

“ So it has been with physics and physiology, and so also, preeminently, with the science of mental life. Mesmerism, hypnotism, the facts of the alteration, the multiplicity, and the annihilation of personality have each brought us their moments of pleasurable terror, and passed thus into the field of general interest. But science can accept no broken chains. ”

“ The represented object floats so to say in a stream of consciousness. The subject matter which the psychologist investigates is not the objective reality itself, but objective states of consciousness. ”

“ However that may be, the strange history of yellow in the human mind and its striking vicissitudes are not only full of interest, but they really bring us up to a great problem which the psychologist must constantly face under a myriad of aspects: the respective parts which must be assigned to the innate properties of the psychic organism and to the temporary reactions it has acquired under the influence of a slowly shifting environment. How far, the psychologist must so often ask himself, am I investigating the intrinsic qualities of the stream of consciousness? ”

“ Early ideas concerning thought and feeling ignored everything like cause, save in recognising those effects of habit which were forced on men's attention and expressed in proverbs; but there are growing up interpretations of thought and feeling as correlates of the actions and reactions of a nervous structure, that is influenced by outer changes and works in the body adapted changes, the implication being that psychology becomes a science, as fast as these relations of phenomena are explained as consequences of ultimate principles. ”

“ Apart, however, from the fact that psychology has as its subject matter the objects of physical sciences as perceived by and developed in consciousness, it also studies the forms, the character, the way of working of consciousness, it formulates the laws of how consciousness works, and analyzes into simplest elements and their combinations, the rich material that goes to make up the mental life of individual existence, or what is known as mind. ”

“ Our psycho-physical experiments have to do with the consciousness of the evoluted man; . . . we learn little of psychic development through them. Their application to psychic disturbances will be presumably a limited one; it sheds light upon the nature of the more profound disturbances less by direct investigation than by giving information about the changes which are associated with the condition and rise of these disturbances. ”

“ The utilization of mental influences in health and disease becomes the one or the other according to the wisdom and the truth and the insight into the real relations of things, that guide its application. As far removed as chemistry from alchemy, as astronomy from astrology, as the doctrine of the localization of function in the brain from phrenology, as hypnotic suggestion from animal magnetism, are the crude and perverse notions of Christian Scientist or Metaphysical Healer removed from the rational application of the influence of the mind over the body. ”

“ In short, a consistent spiritualistic theory of the relations of mind and body is simply impossible, and we therefore turn to the only hypothesis which remains — the hypothesis according to which the physical series is the condition of the mental. This means that physical events take place independently, according to laws of their own, and that a few of them — namely, certain events in the cortex — are the indispensable condition for the occurrence of mental events. ”