Psychology

“ He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The allotted task of psychology seems to me to be quite clearly defined—viz., to take each feeling at its origin and try to determine its nature and follow its development, in its principal phases, by the help of the documents supplied to us by ethnology, and the history of morals, of religions, and of æsthetic and scientific culture, thus avoiding vagueness and a priori reasoning, without losing our way in an inextricable tangle of facts. ”

“ But psychology holds that this synthesis is the mere phenomenal, and that its constituents—object on the one hand, and subject on the other—are the substantial, in existence. But, inasmuch as psychology can scarcely be supposed to maintain that something of which we have no sort of conception, either adequate or inadequate, is the existing substantial, psychology must be held to teach that we have some vague and glimmering kind of notion of these in their separation, as the substantial in cognition, as well as in existence. ”

“ 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; ”

“ The main problem of psychology is that concerning the nature and origin of our knowledge. More explicitly stated, the question is this: What cognitions or elements of cognition are native to the mind itself, and what cognitions or elements of cognition are imparted to it from without? Or stated perhaps still more distinctly, it is this: In the formation of our knowledge, that is, in our apprehensions of the things around us, what ingredients belong to, and are supplied by, the mind, and what ingredients are contributed by foreign and external causes? ”

“ The standpoint of psychology is individualistic; by whatever methods, from whatever sources its facts are ascertained, they must—to have a psychological import—be regarded as having place in, or as being part of, some one's consciousness or experience. ”

“ To make up, we are psychologists. Oh yes, we are great psychologists! But our psychology is akin to pathology; our psychology is that subtle study of the laws of morbid condition and morbid development, with which healthy people have nothing to do.... ”

“ The fact that psychology postulates an external material world and studies it in so far as it comes to be reflected in consciousness, points to another postulate which psychology must assume in addition, namely, the existence of an inner world consciousness. ”

“ 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 doctrine that psychology is a science of behavior is justified at least to the extent that it emphasizes a factor, the importance of which introspectionism has consistently refused to recognize. Whatever conclusion we may ultimately reach regarding the nature of consciousness, the whole drift of psychological and biological investigation seems to indicate that an adequate232 conception of consciousness and of the distinctive problem of psychology can be attained only on the basis of a painstaking reflection on the facts of behavior. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The general psychological problem is to describe the actual psychic events as they occur, to analyze them into their simplest elements, and inasmuch as it is this purely pragmatic application of psychology to the problem of inference that concerns us, we need to deal only with that law which defines the combination of images and with the question,—how the spirit achieves this combination. ”

“ Psychology, we call to our aid. But civilized man has but recently began to study the underlying strata of his intellectual and spiritual make-up. We are still lisping in the hornbook of psychology. Why then put on dionysian airs and bamboozle ourselves and the world with introspective profundities? ”

“ Psychology is not merely interested in abstract terms with long names. It is no longer absorbed merely in states of consciousness taken separately and analyzed abstractly. The newer functional psychology is increasingly interested in the study of real persons, their purposes and interests, what they feel and value, and how they may learn to realize their highest aspirations. ”

“ In all this there is strongly emphasised the subjective contribution to Psychology,—the value of a discerning and critical introspection and the importance of the subject in all processes of sense, judgment, attention, association, and the like. The mind is not a passive receptacle of experiences, but is continually active, making and shaping, seizing and transforming, absorbing and assimilating the stimuli of its environment. ”

“ While psychology deals with such topics as the subconscious mind, the instincts, the laws of habit, and association of ideas and suggestion, it is after all not so much an academic as a practical question. These forces govern the thought you are thinking at this moment, the way you will feel a half-hour from now, the mood you will be in to-morrow, the friends you will make and the profession you will choose, besides having a large share in the health or ill-health of your body in the meantime. ”

“ I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one. ”

“ There is the psychology of the criminal, the psychology of the politician, and a psychology of the infant. For almost every juncture of life we now call in the services of an expert psychologist as naturally as we send for an emergency plumber. ”

“ Is psychology able to explain, or is any human being competent to know what these qualities are, apart from his perceptions of them? It is always our perceptions of the primary qualities, and not these qualities themselves, which come before the mind, just as it is always our sensations resulting from the secondary qualities, and not the secondary qualities themselves, that we are cognisant of. ”

“ Its roots, however, do not lie in psychology, but in physiology; as the chapter on Volition will abundantly make plain. Will and Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. All the questions which arise concerning one are questions which arise concerning the other. ”

“ It cannot be successfully maintained that a scientific observation of the most unique sort, one which is accepted for the time being simply as a happening in this or that scientist's experience, is as such a psychological datum, for the data in psychological text-books have reference to psychological problems. Psychology deals with the consciousness of the individual in its dependence upon the physiological organism and upon those contents which detach themselves from the objects outside the individual and which are identified with his inner experience. ”

“ From a survey of the literature of Psychical Research one might readily draw the inference that whereas Psychology studies the recognized and explicable phases of mental phenomena, Psychical Research is occupied with the disputed and mysterious. ”

“ Like every other science, ordinary psychology proceeds by means of generalities. Whether it is concerned with percepts or concepts, with the association of ideas or with movements, with the attention or the emotions, it takes these manifestations, wherever it finds them, in men or in animals, and attempts to explain them by tracing them back to their 381most general conditions. It starts with the implied assumption that instincts, habits, intellectual, emotional, voluntary phenomena are to be found in every man. ”

“ It follows that when, for general purposes, we study, not the psychology, but, as at present, the total significance of our conscious life, we are much less interested in the separation between knowledge and will than in that unity which psychology already recognizes, and which philosophy finds of still more organic importance. ”

“ Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. ”

“ Psychology explains the subject and object in consciousness, and that only in relation to the question of "how,"―how we come to know this or that object, but whether there is an object or subject independent of the experiencing thought what the nature of that object or subject is, whether of mental experience stuff or of some extra-mental material, is a question that does not belong to the domain of psychology. ”

“ We have briefly indicated the possibilities of psychology in the various occupations and professions. There is a further application that has no reference to the practical needs of life, but to enjoyment. A psychological knowledge of human nature adds a new interest to all our social experience. The ability to understand the actions and feelings of men puts new meaning into the world. The ability to understand oneself, to analyze one’s actions, motives, feelings, and thoughts, makes life more worth living. ”

“ The modern conception of Psychology is generously comprehensive; it encompasses the endlessly variable and complex processes of human mentality; it pursues with enthusiasm the study of developmental processes of intelligence in childhood, in the animal world, in the unfoldment of the race; it studies, for their own value, the aberrant and pathological forms of mental action, and brings these into relation with, and thus illuminates the comprehension of the normal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While, as we have seen, those parts of psychological doctrine which are concerned with the more mechanical aspects of conduct may ultimately be replaced by Physiology, the parts which deal with the initiation of fresh purposive adjustments, such as the psychology of attention and of feeling, are in principle irreducible to Physiology, and must retain a permanent value 307so long as mankind continues to be interested in the ethical and historical appreciation of human life. ”

“ We asserted that psychology deals with facts of objective, natural existence, the subject matter of science in general. How does it rhyme, it may be asked, with the conclusion just arrived at, namely, that the facts of psychology are different from those with which other natural sciences deal? To this may be answered that facts may agree in being objective, and still differ widely as to kind, a square and a man, a pound and a mile, are all objective, and still their difference is certainly a fundamental one. ”

“ Several writers have on various occasions pointed out, with some reason, that the great analytical work carried on in our day, in the domain of psychology, ought to be completed by studies of a directly opposite character; i.e., analytic and abstract psychology has as its indispensable complement a synthetic and concrete psychology. ”

“ Such a definite substitution of physiological for psychological hypotheses is pretty evidently the goal which the modern “experimental Psychology” has set before itself, and which it is constantly trying to persuade itself it has reached, in respect of some parts at least of its subject. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ While we concern ourselves exclusively with modes of mind as correlatives of nervous changes, we are treating of what was there distinguished as æstho-physiology. We pass to psychology only when we consider the correspondence between the connections among subjective states and the connections among objective actions. Here, then, without transgressing the limits of our immediate topic, we may deal with feelings and functions in their mutual dependencies. ”