Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychologyDewey, John
Philosophy
Human Nature and Conduct: An introduction to social psychology
Dewey, John
Habit; Social psychology
Habit is however more than a restriction of thought. Habits become
negative limits because they are first positive agencies. The more
numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and
foretelling. The more flexible they are, the more refined is perception
in its discrimination and the more delicate the presentation evoked by
imagination. The sailor is intellectually at home on the sea, the hunter
in the forest, the painter in his studio, the man of science in his
laboratory. These commonplaces are universally recognized in the
concrete; but their significance is obscured and their truth denied in
the current general theory of mind. For they mean nothing more or less
than that habits formed in process of exercising biological aptitudes
are the sole agents of observation, recollection, foresight and
judgment: a mind or consciousness or soul in general which performs
these operations is a myth.
The doctrine of a single, simple and indissoluble soul was the cause and
the effect of failure to recognize that concrete habits are the means of
knowledge and thought. Many who think themselves scientifically
emancipated and who freely advertise the soul for a superstition,
perpetuate a false notion of what knows, that is, of a separate knower.
Nowadays they usually fix upon consciousness in general, as a stream or
process or entity; or else, more specifically upon sensations and images
as the tools of intellect. Or sometimes they think they have scaled the
last heights of realism by adverting grandiosely to a formal knower in
general who serves as one term in the knowing relation; by dismissing
psychology as irrelevant to knowledge and logic, they think to conceal
the psychological monster they have conjured up.
Now it is dogmatically stated that no such conceptions of the seat,
agent or vehicle will go psychologically at the present time. Concrete
habits do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling,
judging, conceiving and reasoning that is done. "Consciousness," whether
as a stream or as special sensations and images, expresses functions of
habits, phenomena of their formation, operation, their interruption and
reorganization.
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