psychology assignment
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L E C T U R E I § I. Philosophical Anticipations of Psychology. § I I . Spiritual-
ism and Materialism. § I I I . Methods and Aids of Psycho- logical Investigation.
§ I P S Y C H O L O G Y , even in our own day, shows more clearly
than any other experiential science traces of the con- flict of philosophical systems. We may regret this influence in the interest of psychological investigation, because it has been the chief obstacle in the way of an impartial examination of mental life. But in the light of history we see that it was inevitable. Natural science has gradually taken shape from a natural philosophy which paved the way for it, and the effects of which may still be recognised in current scientific theory. That these effects are more fundamental and more permanent in the case of psychology is intelligible when we consider the problem which is set before it. Psychology has to investigate that which we call internal experience,—i.e., our own sensation and feeling, our thought and volition,—in contradistinction to the objects of external experience, which form the subject matter of natural science. Man himself, not as he appears from with- out, but as he is in his own immediate experience, is the real problem of psychology. Whatever else is included in the circle of psychological discussion,—the mental life of animals, the common ideas and actions of mankind which spring from simi- larity of mental nature, and the mental achievements of the individual or of society,—all this has reference to the one original problem, however much our understanding of mental life be widened and deepened by the consideration of it. But the questions with which psychology thus comes into contact are at the same time problems for philosophy. And philosophy
B
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had made various attempts to solve them long before psycho- logy as an experiential science had come into being.
fThe psychology of to-day, then, neither wishes to deny to philosophy its right to occupy itself with these matters, nor is able to dispute the close connection of philosophical and psy- chological problems. But in one respect it has undergone a radical change of standpoint. It refuses to regard psychological investigation as in any sense dependent upon foregone meta- physical conclusions. I t would rather reverse the relation of psychology to philosophy, just as empirical natural science long ago reversed its relation to natural philosophy,—in so far, that is, as it rejected all philosophic speculations which were not based upon experience. Instead of a psychology founded upon philosophical presuppositions, we require a philosophy to whose speculations value is ascribed only so long as they pay regard at every step to the facts of psychological, as well as to those of scientific, experience.
It will, therefore, be a matter of principle for us in these lec- tures to stand apart from the strife of philosophic systems. But since the thought of to-day is subjected on all sides to the in- fluence of a philosophic past which counts its years by thou- sands, and since the concepts and general notions under which an undifferentiated philosophy arranged the facts of mental life have become part of the general educated consciousness, and have never ceased to hinder the unprejudiced consideration of things as they are, it is our bounden duty to characterise and justify the standpoint which we propose to adopt. We will, therefore, first of all glance for a moment at the history of philosophy before the appearance of psychology.
In the beginnings of reflective thought, the perception of the external world preponderates over the internal experience of idea and thought, of feeling and will. The earliest psychology is therefore Materialism : the mind is air, or fire, or ether, always some form of matter, however attenuated this matter may become in the effort to dematerialise it. Plato was the first among the Greeks to separate mind from body. Mind he regarded as the ruling principle of the body. And this separa- tion paved the way for the future one-sided dualism which con- sidered sensible existence as the obscuring and debasing of an
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ideal, purely mental being. Aristotle, who combined with the gift of speculation a marvellous keenness of observation, at- tempted to harmonise these opposites by regarding mind as Jhe principle which vitalises and informs matter. He saw the' direct operation of mental powers in the forms of animals, in the expression of the human figure at rest and in movement, even in the processes of growth and nutrition. And he gene- ralised all this in his conclusion that mind is the creator of all organic form, working upon matter as the sculptor works on marble. Life and mentality were for him identical terms ; even the vegetable world was on his theory endowed with mind. But, apart from this, Aristotle penetrated more deeply than any of his predecessors into the facts of mental experience. I n his work upon the mind, the first in which psychology was ever treated as an independent science, he sharply separates from one another the fundamental mental activities ; and, so far as the knowledge of his time allowed, sets forth their causal connections.
The Middle Ages were wholly dominated by the Aristotelian psychology, and more especially by its basal proposition that mind is the principle of life. But with the dawn of the modern period begins in psychology, as elsewhere, the return to Platonism. Another influence combined with this to displace Aristotelianism ; namely, the development of modern natural science and the mechanical metaphysics which this develop- ment brought with it. The result of these influences was the origin of two psychological schools, which have disputed with one another down to the present day,—Spiritualism and Materialism. I t is a curious fact that the thought of a single man has been of primary importance in the development of both these standpoints. Descartes, the mathematician and philosopher, had defined mind, in opposition to Aristotle, as exclusively thinking substance ; and following Plato, he ascribed to it an original existence apart from the body, whence it has received in permanent possession all those ideas which transcend the bounds of sensible experience. This mind, in itself unspatial, he connected with the body at one point in the brain, where it was affected by processes in the external world, and in its turn exercised influence upon the body.
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Later Spiritualism has not extended its views far beyond these limits. I t is true that Leibniz, whose doctrine of monads regarded all existence as an ascending series of mental forces, attempted to substitute for the Cartesian mind-substance a more general principle, approximating once more to the Aristotelian concept of mind. But his successor Christian Wolff returned to the Cartesian dualism. Wolff is the originator of the so-called theory of mental faculties, which has influenced psychology down to the present day. This theory, based upon a superficial classification of mental processes, was couched in terms of a number of general notions,—memory, imagination, sensibility, understanding, etc.,—which it regarded as simple and funda- mental forces of mind. I t was left for Herbart, one of the acutest thinkers of our century, to give a convincing proof of the utter emptiness of this ' theory.' Herbart is at the same time the last great representative of that modern Spiritualism which began with Descartes. For the works of Kant and of the other philosophers who came after him,—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, —belong to a different sphere. In Herbart we still find the concept of a simple mind-substance, which Descartes introduced into modern philosophy, but pushed to its extreme logical conclusion, and at the same time modified by the first principles of Leibniz' monadology. And the consistency of this final representative of speculative psychology makes it all the more plain that any attempt to derive the facts of mental life from the notion of a simple mind and its relation to other existences different from or similar to itself must be vain and fruitless. Think what lasting service Herbart might have done psychology, endowed as he was in exceptional measure with the power of analysing subjective perception, had he not expended the best part of his ingenuity in the elaboration of that wholly imaginary mechanics of ideation, to which his metaphysical presuppositions led him. Still, just because he carried the concept of a simple mind-substance to its logical conclusion, we may perhaps ascribe to his psychology, besides its positive merits, this negative value, —that it showed as clearly as could be the barrenness of Spiritualism. A l l that is permanent in Herbart's psychological works we owe to his capacity of accurate observation of mental fact; all that is untenable and mistaken proceeds from his
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metaphysical concept of mind and the secondary hypotheses which it compelled him to set up. So that the achievements of this great Spiritualist show most plainly that the path which he travelled, apart from all the contradictions into which it led him, cannot ever be the right road for psychology. This notion of a simple mental substance was not reached by analysis of mental phenomena, but was superimposed upon them from without. To assure the pre-existence and immortality of the soul, and (secondarily) to conform in the most direct way with the logical principle that the complex presupposes the simple, it seemed necessary to posit an indestructible and therefore absolutely simple and unalterable mind-atom. I t was then the business of psychological experience to reconcile itself with this idea as best it might.
§ H
When Descartes denied mind to animals, on the ground that the essence of mind consists in thought, and man is the only thinking being, he could have little imagined that this proposi- tion would do as much as the strictly mechanical views which he represented in natural philosophy to further the doctrines which are the direct opposite of the Spiritualism which he taught,—the doctrines of modern Materialism. I f animals are natural automata, and if all the phenomena which general belief refers to sensation, feeling, and will are the result of purely mechanical conditions, why should not the same explanation hold of man ? This was the obvious inference which the Materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew from Descartes' principles.
The naive Materialism with which philosophy began had simply ascribed some kind of corporeality to mental existence. But this modern Materialism took as its first principles physiological hypotheses; thought, sense, and idea are physiological functions of certain organs within the nervous system. Observation of the facts of consciousness is of no avail until these are derived from chemical and physical processes. Thought is simply a result of brain activity. Since this activity ceases when circulation is arrested and life departs, thought is
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nothing more than a function of the substances of which the brain is composed.
More particularly were the scientific investigators and physicians of the time inclined, by the character of their pursuits, to accept this explanation of mental life in terms of what seemed to them intelligible scientific facts. The Materialism of to-day has made no great advance in this or in any other direction upon the views promulgated in the last century, e.g. by de la Mettrie, and developed by Helvetius, Holbach, and others. But this equating of mental process and brain function, which makes psychology a department of cerebral physiology, and therefore a part of a general atomic mechanics, sins against the very first rule of scientific logic,—that only those connections of facts may be regarded as causal which obtain between generically similar phenomena. Our feelings, thoughts, and volitions cannot be made objects of sensible perception. We can hear the word which expresses the thought, we can see the man who has thought it, we can dissect the brain in which it arose ; but the word, the man, and the brain are not the thought. And the blood which circulates in the brain, the chemical changes which take place there, are wholly different from the act of thought itself.
Materialism, it is true, does not assert that these are the thought, but that they form it. As the liver secretes bile, as the muscle exerts motor force, so do blood and brain, heat and electrolysis, produce idea and thought. But surely there is no small difference between the two cases. We can prove that bile arises in the liver by chemical processes which we are able, in part at least, to follow out in detail. We can show, too, that movement is produced in muscles by definite processes, which are again the immediate result of chemical transformation. But cerebral processes give us no shadow of indication as to how our mental life comes into being. For the two series of phenomena are not comparable. We can conceive how one motion may be transformed into another, perhaps also how one sensation or feeling is transformed into a second. But no system of cosmic mechanics can make plain to us how a motion can pass over into a sensation or feeling.
A t the same time modern Materialism pointed out a more
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legitimate method of research. There are numerous experiences which put beyond all doubt the connection of physiological cerebral function on the one hand and of mental activity on the other. And to investigate this connection by means of experi- ment and observation is assuredly a task worth undertaking. But we do not find that Materialism, even in this connection, has made a single noteworthy contribution to our positive knowledge. I t has been content to set up baseless hypotheses regarding the dependence of mental function upon physical process ; or it has been concerned to refer the nature of mental forces to some known physical agency. No analogy has been too halting, no hypothesis too visionary, for its purpose. It was for some time a matter of dispute whether the mental force had more resem- blance to light or to electricity. Only on one point was there general agreement,—that it was not ponderable.
In our day the conflict between Materialism and Spiritualism, which was raging in the middle of the century, has almost worn itself out. It has left behind it nothing of value for science ; and that will not surprise any one who is acquainted with its details. For the clash of opinion was centred once more round the old point: in the questions concerning mind, the seat of mind, and its connection with body. Materialism had made the very same mistake which we have charged to the spiritualistic philosophy. Instead of plunging boldly into the phenomena which are pre- sented to our observation and investigating the uniformities of their relation, it busied itself with metaphysical questions, an answer to which, if we may expect it at all, can only be based upon an absolutely impartial consideration of experience, which refuses to be bound at the outset by any metaphysical hypothesis.
§ H I
We find, then, that Materialism and Spiritualism, which set out from such different postulates, converge in their final result. The most obvious reason of this is their common methodological error. The belief that it was possible to establish a science of mental experience in terms of speculation, and the thought that a chemical and physical investigation of the brain must be the
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first step towards a scientific psychology led alike to mistakes in method. The doctrine of mind must be primarily regarded as an experiential science. Were this otherwise, we should not be able so much as to state a psychological problem. The standpoint of exclusive speculation is, therefore, as unjustifiable in psychology as it is in any science. But more than this, so soon as we take our stand upon the ground of experience, we have to begin our science, not with the investigation of those experiences which refer primarily only to objects more or less closely connected with mind, but with the direct examination of mind itself,—that is, of the phenomena from which its existence was long ago inferred, and which formed the original incentive to psychological study. The history of the science shows us that mind and the principal mental functions were distinguished before there was any idea that these functions were connected with the brain. I t was not any doubt as to the purpose of this organ which led to the abstraction which lies at the foundation of the doctrine of mind, but simply observation of mental phenomena. Sense, feeling, idea, and will seemed to be related activities ; and they appeared, further, to be bound together by the unity of self-consciousness. The mental processes began, therefore, to be looked upon as the actions of a single being. But since these actions were found again to be intimately connected with bodily functions, there necessarily arose the question of assigning to mind a seat within the body, whether in the heart, or the brain, or any other organ. I t was reserved for later investigation to show that the brain is the sole organ which really stands in close connection with the mental life.
But if it be sensation, feeling, idea, and will which led in the first instance to the assumption of mind, the only natural method of psychological investigation will be that which begins with just these facts. First of all we must understand their empirical nature, and then go on to reflect upon them. For it is experience and reflection which constitute each and every science. Experience comes first; it gives us our bricks : reflec- tion is the mortar, which holds the bricks together. We cannot build without both. Reflection apart from experience and ex- perience without reflection are alike powerless. I t is therefore essential for scientific progress that the sphere of experience be
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enlarged, and new instruments of reflection from time to time invented.
But how is it possible to extend our experience of sensations, feelings, and thoughts ? Did not mankind feel and think thousands of years ago, as it feels and thinks to-day ? I t does, indeed, seem as though our observation of what goes on in the mind could never extend beyond the circle to which our own consciousness confines it. But appearances are deceptive. Long ago the step was taken which raised the science of psychology above the level of this its first beginning, and extended its horizon almost indefinitely. History, dealing with the expe- rience of all times, has furnished us with a picture in the large of the character, the impulses, and the passions of mankind. More especially is it the study of language and linguistic de- velopment, of mythology and the history of religion and custom, which has approached more and more closely, as historical knowledge has increased, to the standpoint of psychological inquiry.
The belief that our observation is confined to the brief span of our individual life, with its scanty experience, was one of the greatest obstacles to psychological progress in the days of the earlier empiricism. And the opening up of the rich mines of experience to which social psychology gives us access, for the extension of our own subjective perceptions, is an event of importance and of promise for the whole circle of the mental sciences. Nor is that all. A second fact, of still greater import for the solution of the simplest and therefore, most general psychological problems, is the attempt that has been made to discover new methods of observation. One new method has been found ; it is that of experiment, which, though it revolu- tionized the natural sciences, had not up to quite recent times found application in psychology. When the scientific inves- tigator is inquiring into the causes of a phenomenon, he does not confine himself to the investigation of things as they are given in ordinary perception. That would never take him to his goal, though he had at his command the experiences of all time. Thunderstorms have been recorded, indeed carefully described, since the first beginnings of history ; but what a storm was could not be explained until the phenomena of
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electricity had become familiar, until electrical machines had been constructed and experiments made with them. Then the matter was easy. For when once the effects of a storm had been observed and compared with the effect of an electric spark, the inference was plain that the discharge of the machine was simply a storm in miniature. What the observation of a thousand years had left unexplained was understood in the light of a single experiment. Even astronomy, a science which we might think must of its very nature be confined to observa- tion, is in its more recent development founded in a certain sense upon experiment. So long as mere observations were taken, the general opinion that the earth was fixed, and that the sun and stars moved round it, could not be overthrown. I t is true that there were many phenomena which made against this belief; but simple observation could not furnish means for the attainment of a better explanation. Then came Copernicus, with the thought: ' Suppose I stand upon the s u n ! ' and henceforth it was the earth that moved, and not the sun ; the contradictions of the old theory disappeared, and the new system of the universe had come into being. But it was an experiment that had led to this, though an experiment of thought. Observation still tells us that the earth is fixed, and the sun moving; and if the opposite view is to become clear, we must just repeat the Copernican experiment, and take our stand upon the sun.
I t is experiment, then, that has been the source of the decided advance in natural science, and brought about such revolutions in our scientific views. Let us now apply experi- ment to the science of mind. We must remember that in every department of investigation the experimental method takes on an especial form, according to the nature of the facts investi- gated. In psychology we find that only those mental pheno- mena which are directly accessible to physical influences can be made the subject matter of experiment. We cannot experi- ment upon mind itself, but only upon its outworks, the organs of sense and movement which are functionally related to mental processes. So that every psychological experiment is at the same time physiological, just as there are physical processes corresponding to the mental processes of sensation, idea, and
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will. This is, of course, no reason for denying to experiment the character of a psychological method. I t is simply due to the general conditions of our mental life, one aspect of which is its constant connection with the body.
The following lectures are intended as an introduction to psychology. They do not attempt any exhaustive exposition of the methods and results of experimental psychological inves- tigation. That would have to assume previous knowledge which cannot here be presupposed. Neither shall we include in the range of our discussion the facts of social psychology, whose contents is extensive enough to demand an independent treatise. We shall confine ourselves to the mental life of the individual ; and within those limits it will be the human mind to which we shall for the most part devote ourselves. A t the same time it appears desirable, for the right understanding of individual mental development, that we should now and again institute a brief comparison with the mental life of animals.
