The Mind and the Brain: Being the Authorised Translation of L'Âme et le CorpsBinet, Alfred
Philosophy
The Mind and the Brain: Being the Authorised Translation of L'Âme et le Corps
Binet, Alfred
Mind and body
Over these definitions by point of view, one might quibble a little;
for those who thus define psychology are not always consistent with
themselves. In other passages of their writings they do not fail to
oppose psychical to physiological phenomena, and they proclaim the
irreducible heterogeneity of these two orders of phenomena and the
impossibility of seeing in physics the producing cause of the moral.
Ebbinghaus is certainly one of the modern writers who have most
strongly insisted on this idea of opposition between the physiological
and the psychical, and he is a convinced dualist. Now I do not very
clearly understand in what the principle of heterogeneity can consist
to a mind which admits, on the other hand, that psychology does not
differ from the physical sciences by its content.
However, I confine myself here to criticising the consequences and not
the starting point. The definition of the psychical phenomenon by the
point of view seems to me correct, although it has more concision than
clearness; for it rests especially upon a material metaphor, and the
expression "point of view" hardly applies except to the changes of
perspective furnished by visible objects.
It would be more exact to say that psychology specially studies
certain objects of cognition, such as those which have the character
of representations (reminiscences, ideas, concepts), the emotions, the
volitions, and the reciprocal influences of these objects among
themselves. It studies, then, a part of the material world, of that
world which till now has been called psychological, because it does
not come under the senses, and because it is subjective and
inaccessible to others than ourselves; it studies the laws of those
objects, which laws have been termed mental.[37]
These laws are not recognised, popularly speaking, either in physics
or in biology; they constitute for us a cognition apart from that of
the natural world. Association by resemblance, for example, is a law
of consciousness; it is a psychological law which has no application
nor counterpart in the world of physics or biology. We may therefore
sum up what has been said by the statement that psychology is the
study of a certain number of laws, relations, and connections.
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