Psychology - William James - Google Libros

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CONTENTS.

Psychology defined; psychology as a natural science, its

data, 1. The human mind and its environment, 3. The pos-

tulate that all consciousness has cerebral activity for its condi-

SENSATION IN GENERAL

Incoming nerve-currents, 9. Terminal organs, 10. 'Spe-

cific energies,' 11. Sensations cognize qualities, 13. Knowl-

edge of acquaintance and knowledge-about, 14. Objects of

sensation appear in space, 15. The intensity of sensations, 16.

Weber's law, 17. Fechner's law, 21. Sensations are not

psychic compounds, 23. The law of relativity,' 24. Effects

of contrast, 26.

The eye, 28. Accommodation, 32. Convergence, binocular

Double images, 36. Distance, 39. Size, color

40. After-images, 43. Intensity of luminous objects, 45.

The ear, 47. The qualities of sound, 43. Pitch, 44.

bre,' 45. Analysis of compound air-waves, 56. No fusion of

elementary sensations of sound, 57. Harmony and discord, 58.

Discrimination by the ear, 59.

47

TOUCH, THE TEMPERATURE SENSE, THE MUSCULAR SENSE,

End-organs in the skin, 60. Touch, sense of pressure, 60.

Localization, 61. Sensibility to temperature, 63. The muscu

lar sense, 65. Pain, 67.

SENSATIONS OF MOTION

The feeling of motion over surfaces, 70. Feelings in joints,

74. The sense of translation, the sensibility of the semicircu-

lar canals, 75.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BRAIN

Embryological sketch, 78. Practical dissection of the sheep's

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN

General idea of nervous function, 91.

centres, 92. The pigeon's nerve-centres, 96.

spheres do, 97. The automaton-theory, 101. The localization

of functions, 104. Brain and mind have analogous 'elements,'

sensory and motor, 105. The motor zone, 106. Aphasia, 108.

The visual region, 110. Mental blindness, 112. The auditory

region, mental deafness, 113. Other centres, 116.

SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS OF NEURAL ACTIVITY

The nervous discharge, 120. Reaction-time, 121.

reactions, 122. Complicated reactions, 124. The summation

of stimuli, 128. Cerebral blood-supply, 130.

try, 131. Phosphorus and thought, 132.

The frog's nerve-

Its importance, and its physical basis, 134 Due to pathways

formed in the centres. 136 Its practical uses. 138. Concate.

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nated acts, 140. Necessity for guiding sensations in secondarily

automatic performances, 141. Pedagogical maxims concerning

the formation of habits, 142.

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Analytic order of our study, 151. Every state of mind forms

part of a personal consciousness, 152. The same state of mind

is never had twice, 154. Permanently recurring ideas are a

fiction, 156. Every personal consciousness is continuous, 157.

Substantive and transitive states, 160. Every object appears

with a 'fringe' of relations, 163. The 'topic' of the thought,

167. Thought may be rational in any sort of imagery, 168.

Consciousness is always especially interested in some one part

of its object, 170.

The Me and the I, 176. The material Me, 177. The social

Me, 179. The spiritual Me, 181. Self-appreciation, 182. Self-

seeking, bodily, social, and spiritual, 184. Rivalry of the Mes,

186. Their hierarchy, 190. Teleology of self-interest, 193.

The I, or 'pure ego,' 195. Thoughts are not compounded of

'fused' sensations, 196. The 'soul' as a combining medium,

200. The sense of personal identity, 201. Explained by iden-

tity of function in successive passing thoughts, 203. Mutations

of the self, 205. Insane delusions, 207. Alternating person-

alities, 210. Mediumships or possessions, 212. Who is the

The narrowness of the field of consciousness, 217. Dis-

persed attention, 218. To how much can we attend at once?

219. The varieties of attention, 220. Voluntary attention, its

momentary character, 224. To keep our attention, an object

must change, 226. Genius and attention, 227. Attention's

physiological conditions, 228. The sense-organ must be

adapted, 229. The idea of the object must be aroused, 232

Pedagogic remarks, 236. Attention and free-will, 237.

Different states of mind can mean the same, 239. Concep-

tions of abstract, of universal, and of problematic objects, 240.

The thought of the same' is not the same thought over

Discrimination and association; definition of discrimination,

244. Conditions which favor it, 245. The sensation of differ-

ence, 246. Differences inferred, 248. The analysis of com-

pound objects, 248. To be easily singled out, a quality should

aiready be separately known, 250. Dissociation by varying

concomitants, 251. Practice improves discrimination, 252.

The order of our ideas, 253. It is determined by cerebral

laws, 255. The ultimate cause of association is habit, 256.

The elementary law in association, 257. Indeterminateness of

its results, 258. Total recall, 259. Partial recall, and the law

of interest, 261. Frequency, recency, vividness, and emotional

congruity tend to determine the object recalled, 264. Focalized

recall, or ‘association by similarity,' 267. Voluntary trains of

thought, 271. The solution of problems, 273. Similarity no

elementary law; summary and conclusion, 277.

THE SENSE OF TIME

The sensible present has duration, 280.
We have no sense

for absolutely empty time, 281. We measure duration by the

events which succeed in it, 283. The feeling of past time is a

present feeling, 285. Due to a constant cerebral condition, 286.

What it is, 287. It involves both retention and recall, 289.

Both elements explained by paths formed by habit in the brain,

290. Two conditions of a good memory, persistence and nu

merousness of paths, 292. Cramming, 295. One's native re-

tentiveness is unchangeable, 296. Improvement of the mem-

ory, 298. Recognition, 299. Forgetting, 300. Pathological

conditions, 301.

What it is, 302. Imaginations differ from man to man; Gal-

ton's statistics of visual imagery, 303. Images of sounds, 306.

Images of movement, 307. Images of touch, 308. Loss of

images in aphasia, 309. The neural process in imagination,

Perception and sensation compared, 312. The perceptive

state of mind is not a compound, 313. Perception is of definite

things, 316. Illusions, 317. First type: inference of the more

usual object, 318. Second type: inference of the object of

which our mind is full, 321. Apperception,' 326. Genius

and old-fogyism, 327. The physiological process in percep-

tion, 329. Hallucinations, 330.

THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE

The attribute of extensity belongs to all objects of sensation,

335. The construction of real space, 337. The processes

which it involves: 1) Subdivision, 338; 2) Coalescence of differ-

ent sensible data into one thing,' 339; 3) Location in an en-

vironment, 340; 4) Place in a series of positions, 341; 5) Meas-

urement, 342. Objects which are signs, and objects which

are realities, 345. The third dimension,' Berkeley's theory of

distance, 346. The part played by the intellect in space-per-

What it is, 351. It involves the use of abstract characters,

353. What is meant by an 'essential' character, 354. The

'essence' varies with the subjective interest, 358. The two

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