Psychological conceptions in other sciences : the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford 14 May, 1929 / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Myers, Charles S. (Charles Samuel), 1873-1946.
Date:
1929
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychological conceptions in other sciences : the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford 14 May, 1929 / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    within the whole have rather been, like the parts of a statue, carved out of an originally vaguer, less differ¬ entiated, whole. The multicellular adult develops from a single ovum: the structure and functions of the once primitive whole have become specialized and differentiated among a number of now discrete parts. Psychology has long insisted on this standpoint. There was a time when, more physico, the belief was held that in its mental development the infant first experienced separ¬ ate elementary ' sensations ’ of whiteness, softness, warmth, &c., and that by combining these he ultimately obtained the 'perception' of an object, say of its mother’s breast. But we now realize that the percept of the whole object is given, with meaning however vague, from the start; that with growing experience it acquires ever fuller meaning; and that from such maturer percepts the so-called ‘sen¬ sory elements’ become differentiated. These sensory ele¬ ments in their pure form—that is to say, stripped of all meaning save that relating to their quality, intensity, extensity, and the like—are not the first, but among the later, to appear. They are the narrower abstract forma¬ tions constructed by broad experience. First comes the relatively homogeneous, which already contains within itself the germs of the later heterogeneous. This conception has also found biological acceptance in the Mendelian study of heredity. The variations exhibited in later species are believed to be determined by a resolu¬ tion and differentiation of the germinal Mendelian units of the earlier, more homogeneous, species. The elements are, as it were, carved out of the pre-existing and evolving whole; they are not combined to produce it. The future is already contained within the past and present, from which somehow it becomes distilled. Such ‘distillation’ accounts probably for the gradual development of consciousness. It has been distilled from originally lower mental levels, from something very differ¬ ent from itself as we know it; and through the privations resulting from such distillations, the lowest of these levels within the living organism has been reduced to the condi-