Psychology: an elementary text-bookEbbinghaus, Hermann
Science
Psychology: an elementary text-book
Ebbinghaus, Hermann
Psychology
Yet man becomes comprehensible as soon as we apply scientific methods to
the study of his nature. He has indeed numerous faculties, seeing and
hearing, imagination and feeling, reproduction and concentration. These,
however, do not oppose each other, but stand side by side, supplementing
each other, as everything on earth consists of parts which supplement
each other. The fundamental laws of human life are the same as those
which we find in the higher animals. But man’s ability to elaborate
momentary sense impressions is immensely increased: there is no limit to
the associative and selective combination of the elementary impressions.
Thus man establishes his power over all other animals and the inanimate
world, realizing the general purposes common to all organisms by
incomparably higher and richer constructions. But these, however we
esteem them, are derived from the same fundamental forces of nature,
only differing in measure and in their proportions. Mind is not like an
unclean pot in which noble seeds are planted, so that the plants
growing from them do not fit the vessel containing them and unending
discord must result. Mind is a unitary organism which, unfolding its
capacities, adjusts itself more and more perfectly to the circumstances
of chance or of its own creation. As the same atmosphere brings forth
out of wind and water and warmth now fertile rains, now destructive hail
storms, beautiful clouds above, dangerous fog below, so the same mind by
the same natural laws brings forth error and truth, desireful pleasure
and desireless joy, selfishness and morality.
INDEX
Abstraction, 126, 133, 140, 151.
Adaptation, 74.
Affection, 162.
Afferent, 35, 38.
After-image, 74.
Anemia, 27.
Animals, 27, 37, 65, 75, 128, 151, 197.
Apes, 27.
Apperception, 119.
Arborization, 33.
Architecture, 202.
Aristotle, 3, 10, 17.
Art, 14, 24, 196.
Association, 10, 11, 12, 14, 93, 144, 164.
Attention, 11, 12, 87, 115, 121, 125, 144, 151.
Audition, 74, 76.
Auditory, 62, 98.
Automatic, 101.
Axiom, 152.
Beats, 64.
Beethoven, 14.
Belief, 152, 156, 158.
Bessel, 20.
Biology, 16.
Bismarck, 180.
Blind born, 67.
Boycott, 136.
Brain, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28.
Brewster, 17.
Broca, 21.
Buffon, 11.
Bulb, 38.
Cæsar, 136.
Catholic church, 205.
Causality, 5, 7, 8, 9, 177.
Center, 35, 36, 37, 107, 111.
Cerebellum, 38, 39.
Cerebrum, 38, 41.
Christ, 209.
Cicero, 159.
Coherent thought, 142.
Collateral, 32.
Color, 58.
Color-blind, 60, 76.
Color mixture, 61.
Conduct, 162, 176.
Conscience, 206.
Consciousness, 41.
Conservation of energy, 45.
Copernican system, 161.
Cortex, 38, 40, 41.
Corti, 76.
Crime, 97.
Cutaneous, 52, 73.
Davy, 121.
Definition, 141.
Dendrite, 31.
Desire, 109.
Determinism, 181.
Difference tone, 64.
Discrimination, 100.
Distance, 116.
Dream, 142, 156.
Drugs, 27.
Duration, 68.
Education, 24, 97.
Efferent, 35, 38.
Emotion, 168.
Enlightenment, 11.
Esthetics, 14, 185, 197, 202.
Evolution, 5, 16.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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