Principles of physiological psychology / translated from the Fifth edition by E.B. Tichener.

  • Wundt, Wilhelm Max, 1832-1920.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Principles of physiological psychology / translated from the Fifth edition by E.B. Tichener. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    and the word idea itself is at the same time restricted to the contents known as memory images. This confusion is psychologically inexcusable. There is absolutely no reason why a sensation—blue, green, yellow, or what not— should be one thing when it is accompanied simply by an excitation in the ' visual centre ' of the cortex, and another and quite a different thing when this excitation is itself set up by the operation of some external stimulus. As conscious contents, blue is and remains blue, and the idea of an object is always a thing ideated in the outside world, whether the external stimulus or the thing outside of us be really present or not. It is true that the memory image is, oftentimes, weaker and more transient than the image of direct perception. But this difference is by no means constant; we may sense in dreams, or in the state of hallucination, as intensively as we sense under the operation of actual sensory stimuli.1 Such distinctions are, therefore, survivals from the older psychology of reflection, in which the various contents of consciousness acquired significance only as the reflective thought of the philosopher read a meaning into them. It was an accepted tenet of this psychology that ideas enjoy an immaterial existence in the mind, while sensation was regarded as something that makes its way into mind from the outside. Now all this may be right or wrong ; but, whether right or wrong, it evidently has no bearing whatever upon the conscious process as such. The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large. At the same time, physiological psychology has to face a number of problems which do not arise for general psychology : problems that origi- nate in the peculiar interest which attaches to the relations sustained by these ultimate elements of the mental life to the physical processes in the nervous system and its appended organs. Physiology tells us, with ever- increasing conviction, that these relations, especially in the case of sensa- tions, are absolutely uniform; and with an improved understanding of bodily expression, of affective symptomatology, we are gradually coming to see that the feelings too have their laws of correlation, no less uniform, if of an entirely different nature. But this growth of knowledge lays all the heavier charge upon psychology to determine the significance of the various psychophysical relations. A pure psychology could afford, if needs must, to pass them by, and might confine itself to a description of the ele- ments and of their direct interrelations. A physiological psychology, on the other hand, is bound to regard this psychophysical aspect of the prob- lems of mind as one of its most important objects of investigation. (3) The course of our inquiry proceeds naturally from the mental ele- l For a more extended discussion of these terminological questions, see Ch. vu. § 1, below.