Consciousness tends to the personal form, 225. It is in con-
stant change, 229. It is sensibly continuous, 237. Substantive'
and 'transitive' parts of Consciousness, 243. Feelings of rela-
tion, 245. Feelings of tendency, 249. The fringe of the
object, 258. The feeling of rational sequence, 261. Thought
possible in any kind of mental material, 265. Thought and lan-
guage, 267. Consciousness is cognitive, 271. The word Object,
275. Every cognition is due to one integral pulse of thought,
276. Diagrams of Thought's stream, 279. Thought is always
selective, 284.
299. Emotions of Self, 305. Rivalry and conflict of one's different
selves, 309. Their hierarchy, 313. What Self we love in Self-
love,' 317. The Pure Ego, 329. The verifiable ground of the
sense of personal identity, 332. The passing Thought is the only
Thinker which Psychology requires, 338. Theories of Self-con-
sciousness: 1) The theory of the Soul, 342. 2) The Associationist
theory, 350. 3) The Transcendentalist theory, 360. The muta-
tions of the Self, 373. Insane delusions, 375. Alternating selves,
379. Mediumships or possessions, 393. Summary, 400.
Its neglect by English psychologists, 402. Description of it,
404. To how many things can we attend at once? 405. Wundt's
experiments on displacement of date of impressions simultaneously
attended to, 410. Personal equation, 413. The varieties of
attention, 416. Passive attention, 418. Voluntary attention, 420.
Attention's effects on sensation, 425;-on discrimination, 426;-
on recollection, 427;-on reaction-time, 427. The neural pro-
cess in attention: 1) Accommodation of sense-organ, 434.
2) Preperception, 438. Is voluntary attention a resultant or a
force? 447. The effort to attend can be conceived as a
resultant, 450. Conclusion, 453. Acquired Inattention, 455.
Locke on discrimination, 483. Martineau ditto, 484.
taneous sensations originally fuse into one object, 488. The
principle of mediate comparison, 489. Not all differences are
differences of composition, 490. The conditions of discrimina-
tion, 494. The sensation of difference, 495. The transcendental-
ist theory of the perception of differences uncalled for, 498. The
process of analysis, 502. The process of abstraction, 505. The
improvement of discrimination by practice, 508. Its two causes,
510. Practical interests limit our discrimination, 515. Reaction-
time after discrimination, 523. The perception of likeness, 528.
The magnitude of differences, 530. The measurement of dis-
The problem of the connection of our thoughts, 550. It
depends on mechanical conditions, 553. Association is of objects
thought-of, not of 'ideas,' 554. The rapidity of association, 557.
The law of contiguity,' 561. The elementary law of association,
566. Impartial redintegration, 569. Ordinary or mixed associa-
tion, 571. The law of interest, 572. Association by similarity,
578. Elementary expression of the difference between the three
kinds of association, 581. Association in voluntary thought, 583.
Similarity no elementary law, 590. History of the doctrine of
association, 594.
Primary memory, 643. Analysis of the phenomenon of mem-
ory, 648. Retention and reproduction are both caused by paths
of association in the brain, 653. The conditions of goodness in
memory, 659. Native retentiveness is unchangeable, 663. All im-
provement of memory consists in better thinking, 667. Other con-
ditions of good memory, 669. Recognition, or the sense of famil-
iarity, 673. Exact measurements of memory, 676. Forgetting,
679. Pathological cases, 681. Professor Ladd criticised, 687.
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.
Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena. in either of these ways, we soon become aware of inadequacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for example, or recollection, is accounted for on the soul-theory by being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognition or of Memory. These faculties themselves are thought of as absolute properties of the soul; that is, to take the case of memory, no reason is given why we should remember a fact as it happened, except that so to remember it constitutes the essence of our Recollective Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our memory's failures and blunders by secondary causes. But its successes can invoke no factors save the existence of certain objective things to be remembered on the one hand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When, for instance, I recall my graduation-day, and drag all its incidents and emotions up from death's dateless night, no mechanical cause can explain this process, nor can any analysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seem other than an ultimate datum, which, whether we rebel or not at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for granted if we are to psychologize at all. However the associationist may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it 'ideas,' be it'association,' knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an 'irreducible faculty,' he says no more than this admission of the associationist already grants.
And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory simplification of the concrete facts. For why should this absolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the events of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those
« AnteriorContinuar » |