Elements of physiological psychology : a treatise of the activities and nature of the mind from the physical and experimental point of view / by George T. Ladd.

  • Ladd, George Trumbull, 1842-1921.
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of physiological psychology : a treatise of the activities and nature of the mind from the physical and experimental point of view / by George T. Ladd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. nSTTEODUOTIOH. § 1. A CLEAR conception oi Physiological Psychology requires some special knowledge of the nature and methods of those two sci- ences, the results of whose investigation it endeavors to combine. These sciences are, of course, Psychology and Physiology—the latter being understood in a broad way as including also various apphca- tions of the general theory of physics to the functions of the animal organism. But as the form taken by this compound term would itself seem to indicate, the two do not stand upon precisely the same level in effecting this combination, whether we consider the end that the one science into which both enter desires to reach, or the means that it employs to reach the end. For the noun (psychology) in the compound term may be said more particu- larly to define the end desired; the adjective (physiological) the character of the means which it is proposed especially to em- ploy. Hence Physiological Psychology can scarcely claim to be an independent science, or even a definite branch of the science of psychology in general. It is rather to be regarded simply as psychol- ogy approached and studied from a certain—the so-called physi- ological —side or point of view. It is necessary, then, in the first place, to define what we understand by the science of psychology, and how it is proposed to treat this science as subject to the physi- ological method, and as approached by means of physiological ex- perimentation and researches. § 2. Perhaps the most common definition of psychology, up to the present time, has regarded it as the science of the human soul. If this definition had always been given, on beginning the pursuit of the science, only in a provisional way, and with the implied or open confession that it is the business of psychology itself to de- monstrate the existence of a particular entity called the soul, and