There are also very striking variations between individuals even
within normal life; well people are very different from one another.
All that is commonly meant by character or temperament as
distinguishing one person from another is evidence of these
differences. But really to know all about mind we should see what its
variations are, and endeavour to find out why the variations exist.
This gives, then, another topic, "Individual or Variational
Psychology." This subject should also have notice in the story.
4. Allied with this the demand is made upon the psychologist that he
show to the teacher how to train the mind; how to secure its
development in the individual most healthfully and productively, and
with it all in a way to allow the variations of endowment which
individuals show each to bear its ripest fruit. This is "Educational
or Pedagogical Psychology."
5. Besides all these great undertakings of the psychologist, there is
another department of fact which he must some time find very fruitful,
although as yet he has not been able to investigate it thoroughly: he
should ask about the place of the mind in the world at large. If we
seek to know what the mind has done in the world, what a wealth of
story comes to us from the very beginnings of history! Mind has done
all that has been done: it has built human institutions, indited
literature, made science, discovered the laws of Nature, used the
forces of the material world, embodied itself in all the monuments
which stand to testify to the presence of man. What could tell us more
of what mind is than this record of what mind has done? The
ethnologists are patiently tracing the records left by early man in
his utensils, weapons, clothing, religious rites, architectural
remains, etc., and the anthropologists are seeking to distinguish the
general and essential from the accidental and temporary in all the
history of culture and civilization. They are making progress very
slowly, and it is only here and there that principles are being
discovered which reveal to the psychologist the necessary modes of
action and development of the mind. All this comes under the head of
"Race Psychology."
6. Finally, another department, the newest of all, investigates the
action of minds when they are thrown together in crowds. The animals
herd, the insects swarm, most creatures live in companies; they are
gregarious, and man no less is social in his nature. So there is a
psychology of herds, crowds, mobs, etc., all put under the heading of
"Social Psychology." It asks the question, What new phases of the mind
do we find when individuals unite in common action?--or, on the other
hand, when they are artificially separated?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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