Text-book of psychology / by William James.

  • James, William, 1842-1910
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Text-book of psychology / by William James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    interpreted by it when the proper time arrives. Such a provisional body of propositions about states of mind, and about the cognitions which they enjoy, is what I mean by Psychology considered as a natural science. On any ul- terior theory of matter, mind, and knowledge, the facts and laws of Psychology thus understood will have their value. If critics find that this natural-science point of view cuts things top arbitrarily short, they must not blame the book which confines itself to that point of view; rather must they go on themselves to complete it by their deeper thought. Incomplete statements are often practically nec- essary. To go beyond the usual ‘ scientific, assumptions in the present case, would require, not a volume, but a shellful of volumes, and by the present author such a shelf- ful could not be written at all. Let it also be added that the human mind is all that can be touched upon in this book. Although the mental life of lower creatures has been examined into of late years with some success, we have no space for its consideration here, and can only allude to its manifestations incidentally when they throw light upon our own. Mental facts cannot be properly studied apart from the phys- ical environment of which they take cognizance. The great fault of the older rational psychology was to set up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own by which the several activities of remembering, imagin- ing, reasoning, willing, etc., were explained, almost without reference to the peculiarities of the world with which these activities deal. But the richer insight of modern days perceives that our inner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which we dwell, adapted, I mean, so as to secure our safety and prosperity in its midst. Not only are our capacities for forming new habits, for remembering sequences, and for abstracting general prop- erties from things and associating their usual consequences with them, exactly the faculties needed for steering us in this world of mixed variety and uniformity, but our emo*