Outlines of psychology / by Harald Höffding ; translated by Mary E. Lowndes.

  • Høffding, Harald, 1843-1931.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of psychology / by Harald Höffding ; translated by Mary E. Lowndes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    death—find now their natural explanation, a like duality being assumed to exist in everything. The spirits of the dead especially serve as an important element of explanation ; with them dreams and imagination are chiefly occupied, and there is consequently a disposition to find their intervention everywhere. All nature is peopled from the world of dreams. But it would certainly be going too far to suppose that we can dispense altogether with the assumption of a personifying tendency. It is one thing to find the mere appeal to such a tendency not enough ; quite another to dispense with it entirely. A man must at any rate recognize his own person in dreams, and ascribe to the images of other men shown in dreams a life of feeling and will corresponding to his own. If we wholly reject the personifying tendency, it is impossible to explain how man can assume at all the existence of other personal beings besides himself. The dream- theory marks an advance so far, that it makes the fact that man attributes his own mental life to his double easily inteUigible ; in this case he immediately recognizes himself in other relations. But what takes place here differs only in degree from what always takes place when he recognizes a mental life in other beings, who execute movements such as he would himself make in certain moods. His instinct of self-preservation leads him, at an early stage, to attach a meaning to the movements of other beings—to interpret certain looks and attitudes as signs of certain feelings. Such interpretation takes place instinctively and involuntarily, and —to judge from the ease with which a little child learns to dis- tinguish friendly from threatening countenances—is perhaps based upon an innate facuhy. Logically formulated, it would be called an inference by analogy. To what lengths the analogy is carried depends on the standpoint. At the mythological standpoint, man is very ready to ascribe to things outside of himself a mental life like his own. The boundary between the self and the not-self also, is indefinite as with children. Only advancing experience can draw more precise lines of demarkation. The mind is at this stage conceived as an ethereal being, in contrast to the body as a coarser and heavier being. This duality has to pass through many phases before it is developed into the contrast between an immaterial and a material being. The physical characteristics of the conception of mind are only slowly and by degrees worn off. In the mental development of the Greeks' such a refining process occurred in the period between