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
Therefore, in contradistinction to this metaphysical concept of a
mind-substance, we set up the concept of the actuality of mind. Mental
processes are not transient appearances to which the soul stands
in contradistinction as a permanent, unknowable being unrelated to
them, so that any attempt to combine the two must necessarily lead
to a tissue of influences and counter-influences, which were at will
given the conventional names: "ideas, feeling, striving, &c." A
striking example of the futility of such an attempt to make substance
the basis of an explanation of mental life is seen in the last and
most thorough-going of these theories, i.e. in Herbart's so-called
Mechanism of Ideas. Certainly all psychical phenomena is a continual
coming and going, a producing and being produced. But no supersensuous
substance, standing in contradistinction to these phenomena, can help
us to understand the latter in their separate parts, or even in the
connection of these parts into a whole. Sense-perception is a product
of elements of pure sensation, an emotion is the course of directly
experienced feelings, a thought-process is a combination of its
elements established by itself. Nowhere do these facts of real mental
life need another substratum for their interpretation beyond the one
that is given in the facts themselves. And the unity of this life
does not gain in the least, if we add to its own real union another
substance, which is neither perceived nor really experienced, but which
stands as an abstract conception in contradistinction to that mental
life established by itself.
We only need to cast a glance at the sciences most closely connected
with psychology, i.e. the so-called mental sciences, in order to become
aware of the emptiness and futility of this psychological conception
of "substance." The name "mental science" has only the right to exist,
so long as these departments of learning are based upon the facts of
psychology--the mental science in the most general sense of the term.
Now when would a historian, philologist, or jurist make use of any
other means to understand some phenomenon or of any other arguments
to prove some statement than those which spring from immediate facts
of mental life? Why then should the standpoint of psychology be in
absolute contradiction to the stand-points of its most nearly related
sciences? Psychology must not only strive to become a useful basis for
the other mental sciences, but it must also turn again and again to the
historical sciences, in order to obtain an understanding for the more
highly developed mental processes. Racial psychology is the clearest
proof of this latter. It is one of the newest of the mental sciences
and depends absolutely on these relations between psychology and the
historical sciences. It is the first transition from psychology to the
other mental sciences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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