The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout.

  • Stout, George Frederick, 1860-1944.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    involves such actual psychical processes as being glad at a person’s prosperity, grieved at his misfortune, rejoiced to meet him, sorry to part from him, and so on. But these psychical states are merely partial and transient manifes- tations of the permanent friendly disposition. This is the abiding condition of these varying phases of actual emotion. The difference between the musical faculty of a Mozart and that of a man who can hardly learn to tell one note from another is a difference in inherited disposition. There are three ways in which dispositions may be re- garded by the psychologist. Primarily he knows them by the manner in which they operate in determining psychical process. It is from this point of view that he is led in the first instance to posit their existence at all. So regarded, they are merely permanent possibilities of psychical pro- cess. But of course they must in reality be more than this. A naked possibility is nothing. A possibility must be founded in the constitution of actual existence. What kind of actual existence does a psychical disposition possess? It is sometimes said to be an unconscious state, or modification of the subject, and the subject considered as the possessor of such unconscious states or modifications is called a soul. Against this I have nothing to say. It may well be nearer to the ultimate truth than any other statement. But to the psychologist the conception of a soul is not helpful. He has no independent means of knowing anything about it which could be useful to him. For him the term “soul” is virtually only another name for the total system of psychical dispositions and psychical processes. But he has another clue which is more useful. Psychical dispositions, as well as psychical processes, have physiological correlates in states of nervous tissue. A psychical disposition is