The child's mind : its growth and training being a short study of some processes of learning and teaching / by W.E. Urwick.

  • Urwick, W. E. (William Eddowes)
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The child's mind : its growth and training being a short study of some processes of learning and teaching / by W.E. Urwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    responses which they make. As we have defined the term ‘ power,’ such consciousness is manifestly an increase of power. It does not matter for our purpose whether consciousness accompanies only a certain complication of cell life, or is to be found throughout animal organisms; nor are we the least concerned with any question as to what animals possess consciousness and what, if any, do not. The point is merely this, that, whenever consciousness is present in any degree, reporting, as it does, however vaguely, changes in the organism and in the environment, it is manifestly of service to the organism, and, as enabling it to adjust itself more accurately to changes, an increase of power. Conscious life may be supposed, in its earliest and least developed manifestations, to be little more than the vaguest sensibility, a vague, undifferenti- ated, but continuous whole, pleasant in character when the functioning of the organism is normal, changing to a disagreeable tinge when either the functioning itself is wrong, or when a change takes place in environment unsuited to the organism, and turning to pain at the presence of any attack upon the organism, or the appearance of any change which the conscious organism has come to regard as threatening danger. But it cannot be regarded as the function of consciousness to give the organism either pleasurable or painful feeling, for in that case, whenever painful feelings predominate or, indeed, recur, it would then become a question whether consciousness were worth having, and this