The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
Take the latter distinction first: Immediately all the arguments based
on sensations and the new features in them which attention brings to
light fall to the ground. The sensations of the B and the V when we
attend to these sounds and analyze out the laryngeal contribution
which makes them differ from P and F respectively, are _different
sensations_ from those of the B and the V taken in a simple way.
They stand, it is true, for the _same letters_, and thus mean the
_same outer realities_; but they are different mental affections, and
certainly depend on widely different processes of cerebral activity.
It is unbelievable that two mental states so different as the passive
reception of a sound as a whole, and the analysis of that whole into
distinct ingredients by voluntary attention, should be due to processes
at all similar. And the subjective difference does not consist in that
the first-named state _is_ the second in an 'unconscious' form. It is
an absolute psychic difference, even greater than that between the
states to which two different surds will give rise. The same is true
of the other sensations chosen as examples. The man who learns for the
first time how the closure of his glottis feels, experiences in this
discovery an absolutely new psychic modification, the like of which he
never had before. He had another feeling before, a feeling incessantly
renewed, and of which the same glottis was the organic starting point;
but that was not the later feeling in an 'unconscious' state; it was
a feeling _sui generis_ altogether, although it took cognizance of
the same bodily part, the glottis. We shall see, hereafter, that the
same reality can be cognized by an endless number of psychic states,
which may differ _toto cœlo_ among themselves, without ceasing on
that account to refer to the reality in question. Each of them is a
conscious fact: none of them has any mode of being whatever except a
certain way of being felt at the moment of being present. It is simply
unintelligible and fantastical to say, because they point to the same
outer reality, that they must therefore be so many editions of the same
'idea,' now in a conscious and now in an 'unconscious' phase. There is
only one 'phase' in which an idea can be, and that is a fully conscious
condition. If it is not in that condition, then it is not at all.
Something else is, in its place. The something else may be a merely
physical brain-process, or it may be another conscious idea. Either of
these things may perform much the same _function_ as the first idea,
refer to the same object, and roughly stand in the same relations to
the upshot of our thought. But that is no reason why we should throw
away the logical principle of identity in psychology, and say that,
however it may fare in the outer world, the mind at any rate is a place
in which a thing can be all kinds of other things without ceasing to be
itself as well.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account