The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena
and of their conditions. The phenomena are such things as we call
feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like;
and, superficially considered, their variety and complexity is such as
to leave a chaotic impression on the observer. The most natural and
consequently the earliest way of unifying the material was, first,
to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, to affiliate the
diverse mental modes thus found, upon a simple entity, the personal
Soul, of which they are taken to be so many facultative manifestations.
Now, for instance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of
Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its Appetite.
This is the orthodox 'spiritualistic' theory of scholasticism and of
common-sense. Another and a less obvious way of unifying the chaos is
to seek common elements in the divers mental facts rather than a common
agent behind them, and to explain them constructively by the various
forms of arrangement of these elements, as one explains houses by
stones and bricks. The 'associationist' schools of Herbart in Germany,
and of Hume the Mills and Bain in Britain have thus constructed a
_psychology without a soul_ by taking discrete 'ideas,' faint or
vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms
of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions, emotions,
volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an
individual's mind may be engendered. The very Self or _ego_ of the
individual comes in this way to be viewed no longer as the pre-existing
source of the representations, but rather as their last and most
complicated fruit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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