Psychism

“ 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. ”

“ THE STREAM OF THOUGHT.
We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling,—what you like—it must know. ”

“ 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; and, second, to see that it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.
As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest, around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields and some are wide fields. ”

“ To explore the most sacred depths of the unconscious, to labor in what I have just called the subsoil of consciousness, that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await it there, as important perhaps as have been in the preceding centuries the discoveries of the physical and natural sciences. ”

“ According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The bearing of this standpoint on the interpretation of psychology is readily apparent. If it be granted that consciousness is just a name for behavior that is guided by the results of acts not yet performed but reflected beforehand in the objects of experience, it follows that this behavior is the peculiar subject-matter of psychology. It is only by reference to behavior that a distinctive field can be marked off for psychological enterprise. When we say that the flame is hot, the stone hard, and the ice cold and slippery, we are describing objects and nothing more. ”

“ From the roughest to the finest, from matter to spirit, from hypnosis to the psychic state, we find enough to arrest attention and give a high degree of seriousness and earnestness to our investigation. We stand on the threshold of soul, and the place where we stand is holy ground. We find, as is the physical, mental, and spiritual characteristics of the operator, plus those of the sensitive or sensitives, so will be the nature of the phenomena evolved. ”

“ Have we not seen clearly enough that these mental facts which are conceived parallel to physiological brain processes do not represent the immediate reality of our inner life, that our life reality is purposive and as such outside of all causal explanation, and that we have to take a special, almost artificial, point of view to consider inner life at all as objects, as contents of consciousness, and thus as psychological material? ”

“ That ideas and feelings, thus indirectly and mechanically transmitted or stored, can affect the sensitive soul in unmistakable fashion, is a fact of experience; but that deposits in matter are competent to produce so purely psychic an effect can surely only be explained in terms of the potentialities and previous experience of the mind or soul itself. No emotional influence can be expressed, or rendered intelligible, in terms of matter. Matter is an indirect medium of communication between mind and mind. ”

“ So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious, where the self is all-in-all unto itself, active in strong desirous psychic assimilation or in direct repudiation of the contiguous universe; this first plane of psychic activity, polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion of each individual but established in a circuit with the corresponding poles of another individual: this is the first scope of life and being for every human individual, and is beyond question. ”

“ But our account of the soul, as a series of events, may be attacked perhaps from the ground of psychology itself. There are psychical facts, it may be urged, which are more than events, and these facts, it may be argued, refute our definition. I must briefly deal with this objection, and my reply may be summed up thus. There are psychical facts, which are more than events; but, if they are not also events, they are not facts at all. ”

“ If, indeed, our Physiology had reached the point of ideal completeness, so that every routine uniformity at present expressed in psychological terminology as the establishment of an “association” or “habit” could be translated into its physiological correlate, we should be able to dispense altogether with psychological hypotheses as aids to the calculation of the course of events, and to restore logical unity to Psychology by confining it entirely to the task of providing Ethics and History with the teleological categories they require for the description of their subject-matter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We come now to consider the mental apparatus which is at the disposal of the self: to ask what it can tell us of the method by which she may escape from the prison of the sense-world, transcend its rhythm, and attain knowledge of—or conscious contact with—a supra-sensible Reality. ”

“ 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. ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; ”

“ We now avail ourselves of the assistance of this antagonism, which has thus been established as fact by experience, in order to displace the false fact generally, we might say universally, assumed in our current metaphysics—namely, that consciousness, or the fact and notion denoted by the word "I," comes into manifestation at the bidding, and under the influence, of the objects which induce the sensations accompanying it. ”

“ 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? ”

“ He gives a description of the unconscious, emphasizing its importance in the light of the new psychology, and states that it ‘originated not only in the childhood of man but in the childhood of the world,’ and that in it ‘is condensed and capitulated the cultural history of mankind.’ The process of psychoanalysis is outlined, and its value, not only in the treatment of neuroses, but also for the insight it furnishes into certain character defects, is pointed out. ”

“ The life of consciousness falls directly under this principle. Its various stages are related to each other, under law, according to the conception which this principle emphasizes. When we point out 'uniform relations, the dependence of mental state on mental state, of one stage of mental life on other stages of mental life, we render psychology scientific. For the psychologist to surrender all right to claim that he "explains" psychic facts by tracing their causes in other antecedent and concomitant psychic facts — as Mr. ”

“ For I wish to make it quite plain that the psychical fact from which I propose to start, is on what I may perhaps best call the sentient level of consciousness, i.e. involves only a consciousness which feels pleasure and pain, which strives and desires without as yet clear self-consciousness or conception of objects. ”

“ The conclusion to the whole matter is—the psychic, or soul-powers in some persons are less entrammelled by the senses than in others; that a high degree of organic sensitiveness always accompanies those who are recognised as psychics or sensitives; that this state of sensitiveness is natural to some, and in others may be developed by accident, disease, or induced by somnambulism and trance. ”

“ The individual and specific phenomena of consciousness, which the psychologist is generally supposed to study, rest upon a deeper, less explicated, more indefinite, life of sensibility, which in its turn fades away by immeasurable gradations into something irresponsive to the ordinary tests for sensation and life. ”