We now have with all this a fairly complete idea of what The Story of
the Mind should include, when it is all told. Many men are spending
their lives each at one or two of these great questions. But it is
only as the results are all brought together in a consistent view of
that wonderful thing, the mind, that we may hope to find out all that
it is. We must think of it as a growing, developing thing, showing its
stages of evolution in the ascending animal scale, and also in the
unfolding of the child; as revealing its nature in every change of our
daily lives which we experience and tell to one another or find
ourselves unable to tell; as allowing itself to be discovered in the
laboratory, and as willing to leave the marks of its activity on the
scientist's blackened drum and the dial of the chronoscope; as subject
to the limitations of health and disease, needing to be handled with
all the resources of the asylum, the reformatory, the jail, as well as
with the delicacy needed to rear the sensitive girl or to win the love
of the bashful maid; as manifesting itself in the development of
humanity from the first rude contrivances for the use of fire, the
first organizations for defence, and the first inscriptions of picture
writing, up to the modern inventions in electricity, the complex
constitutions of government, and the classic productions of literary
art; and as revealing its possibilities finally in the brutal acts of
the mob, the crimes of a lynching party, and the deeds of collective
righteousness performed by our humane and religious societies.
It would be impossible, of course, within the limits of this little
volume, to give even the main results in so many great chapters of
this ambitious and growing science. I shall not attempt that; but the
rather select from the various departments certain outstanding results
and principles. From these as elevations the reader may see the
mountains on the horizon, so to speak, which at his leisure, and with
better guides, he may explore. The choice of materials from so rich a
store has depended also, as the preface states, on the writer's
individual judgment, and it is quite probable that no one will find
the matters altogether wisely chosen. All the great departments now
thus briefly described, however, are represented in the following
chapters.
CHAPTER II.
WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON--INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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