The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
_The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence of Speech._
Language was originally made by men who were not psychologists, and
most men to-day employ almost exclusively the vocabulary of outward
things. The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate,
hope, and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual
activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with the broadest
genera of æsthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only
facts of a subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by
special words. The elementary qualities of sensation, bright, loud,
red, blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used
in both an objective and a subjective sense. They stand for outer
qualities and for the feelings which these arouse. But the objective
sense is the original sense; and still to-day we have to describe a
large number of sensations by the name of the object from which they
have most frequently been got. An orange color, an odor of violets,
a cheesy taste, a thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recall
what I mean. This absence of a special vocabulary for subjective facts
hinders the study of all but the very coarsest of them. Empiricist
writers are very fond of emphasizing one great set of delusions which
language inflicts on the mind. Whenever we have made a word, they
say, to denote a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose
a substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which the word
shall be the name. But the _lack_ of a word quite as often leads to the
directly opposite error. We are then prone to suppose that no entity
can be there; and so we come to overlook phenomena whose existence
would be patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly
recognized in speech.[196] It is hard to focus our attention on the
nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in the descriptive
parts of most psychologies.
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