The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)James, William
Philosophy
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
For this the associationist must introduce the order of experience in
the outer world. The dance of the ideas is a copy, somewhat mutilated
and altered, of the order of phenomena. But the slightest reflection
shows that phenomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas
until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. The bare
existence of a past fact is no ground for our remembering it. Unless
we have seen it, or somehow _undergone_ it, we shall never know of its
having been. The expediences of the body are thus one of the conditions
of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount
of reflection on facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the
brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned. If the
nervous communication be cut off between the brain and other parts,
the experiences of those other parts are non-existent for the mind.
The eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless.
And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or
altered, even although every other organ in the body be ready to play
its normal part. A blow on the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the
pressure of an apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst
a very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, or a whiff
of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to have the second. The
delirium of fever, the altered self of insanity, are all due to foreign
matters circulating through the brain, or to pathological changes in
that organ's substance. The fact that the brain is the one immediate
bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally
admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating it,
but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the
book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct.
Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly brain-experiences,
must take a place amongst those conditions of the mental life of which
Psychology need take account. _The spiritualist and the associationist
must both be 'cerebralists'_, to the extent at least of admitting that
certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own favorite
principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a
codeterminant of the result. Our first conclusion, then, is that a
certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in
Psychology.[1]
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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