Assignment: The Scope Of Psychology
Assignment: The Scope Of Psychology
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PSYCHOL~GY is the Science of Mental Life, both of ita phenomena and of their conditions. The bhenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reason- ings, 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 con- sequently the earliest way of unifying the material was, first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, to affiliate the diverse mental mod;* thus found, upon a simple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are taken to be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for in- stance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its Appet,ite. 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 ele- ments in the divers mental facts rather than a common agent behind them, and to explain them constructively by the various forms o
Assignment: The Scope Of Psychology
f arrangement of these elements, as one explains houses by stones and bricks. The ‘ association- ist’ schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hnme the Mills and Bain in Britain have thus constructed 8 psychdogy without a aod by taking discrete ‘ideas,’ faint or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms
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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 tlie representations, but rather as their last and most com- plicated fruit.
Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena in either of these ways, we soon become aware of inade- quacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for ex- ample, 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 re- member it constitutes the essence of our Recollective Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our mem- ory’s failures and blunders by secondary causes.
Assignment: The Scope Of Psychology
But its SUCC~SS~S 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 ‘ asso- ciation,’ knows past time a8 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
THE SCOPE OF PSYCBOLOGK 3
of an hour ago? Why, again, in old age should its grasp of childhood’s events seem firmest ? Why should illness and exhaustion enfeeble it ? Why should repeating an ex- perience strengthen our recollection of it ? Why should drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things long since forgotten 4 If we content ourselves with merely affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly con- stituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation becomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with which we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and irrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped with elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort. Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than the remote ? Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner than of abstract names ? Such peculiarities seem quite fan- tastic; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the faculty does not exist absolutely, but worb under coditions ; and the quest ofthe conditions becomes the psychologist’s most interesting task.
However firmly he may hold to the soul and her re- membering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must al- ways precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect, ‘‘ An adea I” says the associationist, cc an idea associated with the remembered thing ; and this explains also why things repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their as- sociates on the various occasions furnish so many distinct avenues of recall.” But this does not explain the effects of fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And in general, the pure associationist’s account of our mental life is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist. This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope,-whence do they get their fantastic laws of clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do ?
For this the associationist must introduce the order of experieiice in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is
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B copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phe- nomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our re- membering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow u&- gone it, we shall never know of its having been. The expe- riences of the body are thus on0 of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although every other organ in the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating through the brain, or to pathological changes in that organ’s substance. The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct.
Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those con- ditions of the mentallife of which Psychology need take account. The spi&tualist and the associationist must both be ‘cerebra&?ts,’ to the extent at least of admitting that certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of the result.
