An Introduction to Psychology: Translated from the Second German EditionWundt, Wilhelm Max
Science
An Introduction to Psychology: Translated from the Second German Edition
Wundt, Wilhelm Max
Educational psychology; Psychology
measure, and that they only obtain one, if we make them the object
of a comparative judgment, i.e. in a sense translate them into the
psychological. Disparate values cannot in any way be compared, so long
as a transformation of the one into the other is impossible. We can
compare warmth and mechanical work, because the one can be transformed
into the other according to a strict law of equivalence. But we
cannot compare a tone with a sensation of light, or a visual idea
with a chord, because a transformation of the one of these practical
contents into the other is unthinkable. Now physical values are
subject to the principle of the conservation of energy because of the
unlimited capacity for transformation of physical energies according to
equivalent relations. But it has on the other hand no sense to try to
apply this same principle to the qualitative psychical values, which do
not in any way admit of such a transformation. This of course stands in
close relation with the fact that the subject-matter of psychology is
the whole manifoldness of qualitative contents directly presented to
our experience, each of which would immediately lose its own peculiar
quality, if we tried to transform it into any other. Thus the physical
phenomena investigated by the natural sciences and the laws of these
phenomena do not in the least contradict the qualitative content of
life dealt with by psychology. They rather supplement each other,
inasmuch as we must combine them together into one whole, if we wish
to understand the life of the psycho-physical being given to us in its
unity.
Yet this impossibility of comparison of these qualities could not
exist along with the unity of their substratum, if the physical and
psychical values were not joined together in this substratum. This
connection consists herein, that on the one side the physical elements,
whether atoms or parts of one continuous matter, must necessarily
be thought by us in forms of spatial and temporal ideas arising in
accordance with psychical laws, and on the other side the psychical
elements, the simple sensations and feelings, are inalienably bound
up with definite physical processes. These latter need by no means
be of a simple constitution, as has at times been presupposed by
reason of metaphysical prejudices. The opposite is rather the case,
as experience, which alone in this question can decide, incontestably
teaches. For it shows that each simple sensation is joined to a very
complicated combination of peripheral and central nerve-processes, and
so also with the most elementary feeling, as is shown by the manifold
"expression" phenomena which accompany the simplest feeling.
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