Psychology; a short account of the human mind

Front matter

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FSTCHOLOGY

E S. GHANGER

Preface

This book is intended as a brief introduction to the study of the human mind. In writing it, I have tried to anticipate and to remove some of the difficulties which are usually felt by students on taking up the subject for the first time. The illustrations are largely drawn from everyday experiences and familiar books. The use of technical terms has been avoided as far as possible. Where they occur, they are explained in the text, and referred to in the index by a different type. The index thus, to some extent, serves the purpose of a glossary. Those readers who do not know any logic, may find it advisable to begin the book at the second chapter, and to leave the first until they have read the account of logical processes given in the chapter on Reasoning.

I am indebted to Prof. Symes for some useful hints, and to Mr. J. W. Carr, M.A. for revising the proofs from page 65 to the end.

F. S, G.

University College, Nottingham, April 1 89 1.

Contents

CHAP.

I. ON PSYCHOLOGICAL METHOD

■PAGE

Chapter I. On Psychological Method

I. Introduction. — Psychology is the name given to the study of mind. Like other sciences, it starts from the familiar and the obvious, and is therefore foreshadowed in common ways of thinking ; we are all psychologists, even if we do not know it. Those persons who are least given to reflection, habitually mark off the outer world of form and colour, of force and movement, from the inner world of thought, feeling, and will ; the realm of nature from the realm of mind. In making this distinction, they anticipate the separation of the sciences concerned with mind from other sciences ; while physics and chemistry, for instance, deal with changes in external things, psychology looks within, and observes the changes which take place there. Another familiar distinction is often made, namely, between being and seeming ; and this, too, is interesting to the psychologist. Changes in outer objects, and indeed outer objects themselves, only become known to us through the impressions which they make upon us. The blue of the sky which shows through the rain-clouds, the sparrows twittering in yonder trees, the cart which rumbles down the road, the clock ticking above my head, must affect me through one of the channels of perception, the eye or the ear for example, or else they might just as well not be at all, as far as I am concerned. Usually, indeed, we prefer to know what a thing is, and leave on one side as unim^- portant what it seems ; the psychologist, however, is more concerned with the operation of things upon us, than with their actual nature ; being yields in importance to seeming. The colours and sounds, the pressures and repulsions which surrounding things give rise to, and by which they make themselves known, are not viewed as the attributes of those things, but as the effects which they produce in us. We have to remember that to see or to hear anything is simply to have an impression of sight or hearing, and that these impressions only exist in the mind of the observer ; and so that outer world, which generally seems so real, fades away, and leaves us in possession of a bundle of impressions. Side by side with these impressions of outer things, there pass across our inward view reflections, feelings, desires, which are present to us in the same immediate fashion as sense impressions. To the psychologist, these other elements of our mental states are also real in a sense which exceeds the reality of the outer world ; they are known directly, the outer world is known only through its effects upon us. For the psychologist a purpose, or an emotion, is more real than the ground on which he stands.

2. Use of terms in Psychology. — One of the first questions in dealing with a science is this : What terms shall be used to describe its objects? The question is peculiarly important in psychology. As we saw in the last paragraph, the states with which it is concerned are the very material out of which our knowledge is built up, and cannot therefore be defined by anything more familiar than themselves. It will be necessary, then, to start with the terms ordinarily used, and gradually to make clear what we mean by them.

Greater caution is required here than almost anywhere else in the use of terms ; and not once, nor twice, has carelessness in this respect produced the most disastrous consequences. The use of names, like reason, conscience, will, for classes of mental operations, has given way to their use to denote the so-called faculties ; and then, by a very comprehensible error, these faculty-names have been thought to explain the operations which they denote. Conscientious acts have been interpreted by a reference to conscience, volitions by a reference to the will, and so forth. Of course this does not help us ; the mind has not its will here, its conscience there, and its reason somewhere else ; it reasons, wills, and is conscientious as a whole ; yet this fallacy is so ingrained in common speech that it is difficult entirely to free ourselves from it.'^

The student of the standard psychological works of the present stands in little danger of such an obvious 'mistake as this ; his perils are of a subtler kind. Among thinkers who have paid attention to psychology, we can generally trace the influence of their other studies on their style of thought and expression. Thus Kant and Locke still make use of the language of the schools with the corrections and explanations necessary for their purpose. The scientific bent of Descartes is shown in the deductive form of his Principles of Philosophy. Herbart, again, borrows from the rapidly advancing physics of his time the notion of a mechanism, and applies it to psychology ; and perhaps the

^ Spinoza, Ethics, ii. 48.

great importance attached by the Associationist school to the accumulation of small mental elements may be explained by the analogy of the Penny Savings Bank. Logic, mathematics, mechanics, and political economy having thus in turn contributed to the psychologist's vocabulary, it might have been expected that the brilliant discoveries which have been made of late years in biology would not fail to leave their mark, and this we find to be the case ; expressions like function, development, and so on, are used in a biological sense.

It may not be unprofitable, then, to consider for a moment how far the use of such metaphors may affect our views of the facts. There is this risk at any rate, namely, that in employing any single set of terms for complex and varied groups of facts, some of them may be distorted or lost sight of. The ultimate feelings of our nature are probably of more than one kind, and, therefore, when we use the metaphors drawn from the sense of sight such as trace, image, background, or, from the sense of resistance, such as motive, conflict, tension, we must always remember that we are, after all, dealing with figures of speech, and that they have to stand for all kinds of experiences however received, and not merely for those received by way of sight or the muscular sense. More dangerous suppositions still lurk in the application of metaphors drawn from the commoner movements, as, for instance, grasping, weighing, apprehending, and so on ; here we are led to think of the mind as a workman standing outside of, and having a separate existence from, his work. Physiological expressions are dangerous, too, when transferred from the nervous process to the mental one. Recently a physician, lecturing in one of the older universities to teachers, defined

ON PSYCHOLOGICAL METHOD. S

thought to consist in " the formation of the union of cells ! "

It would almost seem, then, that the danger of confused habits of thought is less when the terms used in psychology are colourless and general in their associations. In this way we should be led to prefer the fairly abstract vocabulary of physics, or the quite abstract one of pure mathematics ; and it is one of the chief services performed by Herbart •that he clothed his system in terms of such general applicability. The reader will therefore be prepared to use algebraic symbols at times, as has so long been done in logic. We shall find as we proceed that the study of psychology involves the dissection or analysis of complex states of mind into their constituent parts ; hence terms like element, factor, sum, combination, tendency, resultant, product, will be used with the signification which they possess in physics and pure mathematics. By the term element, particularly, will be meant any constituent part of a state of mind ; by the term factor, will be meant any circumstance which contributes directly or indirectly to its occurrence. For example, some visual sensations are necessary constituent parts in a complete perception of a clock, and may thus be spoken of as elements in that perception. A necessary circumstance in my perception is that I should be in the neighbourhood of the clock. This, then, is a factor. Observe that all elements in a state of mind are necessarily circumstances which determine it, and are therefore factors. We may not turn the statement round and say that all factors in a state of mind are necessarily elements which we can observe in 'it. The signal point in the study of psychology is that the factors which determine any single state of mind are for the most part removed from our immediate inspection, and can only be arrived at by inference. Your esteem for one person, and aversion from another, are states of mind determined by many past experiences which are not clearly remembered, and do not therefore enter as elements into those states of mind, but for all that they have been factors in their production.

3. Relation of Psychology to other Sciences. — Psychology is a science with well-marked boundaries. Its subject-matter consists in those states which constitutes our inner, or mental, life, as opposed to the changes in the outer world which are investigated by natural science. It uses the same instruments as they, observation and experiment, and the same methods, induction and deduction ; but it has this advantage over them, that while they have to interpret sensations of resistance, colour, form, sound, and smell into those attributes of external objects, which give rise to them, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, and so get their materials second-hand, the student of mind need not go further than his own consciousness for his subject-matter, and can question his own experience directly. It is in this sense that Aristotle, at the beginning of his work on this subject, speaks of its greater accuracy.

There are, of course, numerous points of connection between the study of mind and other sciences. In enumerating the conditions of mental action, account has to be taken of physiological conditions, and of all the facts in chemistry and physics which they involve. Further, the operations of the mind form one group of cases in which the laws of dynamics are illustrated, and thus depend for explanation on the sciences of force and quantity ; and, to a certain extent, the different intensities and forms assumed by mental states, are capable of exact treatment by these sciences.

Psychology occupies a central position in the studies which are concerned with man. From it diverge, on the one hand, the sciences which regard him as one among the animals, and investigate his anatomical characteristics, his relation to other animals, the differences produced in his physical constitution by climatic and other conditions ; on the other hand, the sciences which treat of him in his social relations, as a member of a body politic, as a wealthproducing and consuming being, and so on. In all these sciences he is regarded as conforming to some average type.

Special branches of science, however, are occupied with the divergencies from the average which arise from time to time. Pathology in its ordinary acceptation, deals with physiological deviations. Corresponding to, and in close connection with, this science, stands mental pathology which deals with aberrations like insanity, hypnotism, crime, and so forth. Psychology has lent its own light to solve the difficulties of these sciences of error, and has in turn, received contributions from them. The study of insanity, hypnotism, dreaming, and crime, has already helped to solve many questions in psychology.

There are several subordinate sciences which stand in the closest relations to psychology. Each of the three chief aspects under which mental operations are most often regarded — thought, feeling, and will — has given rise to a special science. Logic investigates the forms of thought which subserve the attainment of the truth. .Esthetic considers those relations between the mind and its object which give rise to the feeling of the beautiful. Ethic scrutinizes that relation between the agent and his act on which moral approval is passed.

4. The Instruments of Psychology: Introspection. — Reference has already been made to the fact that psychology can deal with its material at first hand. Our states of mind, with some reservations to be noticed immediately, are accessible to direct observation. But this direct observation is permitted to us only as individuals. Hence that unique sense of ownership, with which we regard our thoughts and feelings ; they are ours in a way which excludes all other persons from any immediate share in them. At the same time we are in like manner shut out from the inner lives of our fellows.

On this fact is based the important distinction between internal and external, or to slightly change the phrases, between mind and body. Whatever fact is beyond our immediate consciousness is external to us ; hence even the body, which seems so near, is for the psychologist as much an external object as any other material object. And generally, all operations of mind, in whatever consciousness they present themselves, are marked off from physical, chemical, and biological processes, as the mental from the material.

The observation of our own states is called introspection, or looking within, to mark it off from that outward gaze upon surrounding objects which, though it is an indirect process performed by interpreting our impressions into their causes, is nevertheless the ordinary attitude of every one. In practice, however, difficulties turn up in applying this process of introspection, which somewhat diminish its value. By the nature of the case, only one observer can record what is going on in any particular mind ; thus there is a risk of error for want of the check which is afforded by comparing independent results. In a matter, also, which so intimately concerns us as this inner life, it is unusually difficult to be candid and impartial, and so the process is vitiated not only by the want of a check upon individual observations, but also by the partiality of the only witness.

Again, the act of attention, which introspection involves, is one which cannot accompany any but very intellectual states of mind. We can take note, for example, of what is presented to consciousness in solving an algebraical problem, but few men are so imbued with the scientific spirit as calmly to register their feelings, when they pass through some moving experience, some agony of pain or pleasure. Shut off in such cases from immediate observation at the moment, we must perforce content ourselves with looking back, when the states to be observed have passed away, and when our results have all the imperfections of a remembered, as opposed to a direct, observation.

Nevertheless, with due precaution, this instrument of introspection will prove valuable, and the reader will often be called upon to exercise it in the sequel. The account of mental phenomena, which will be laid before him, is offered for comparison with his own inner experience, and any cogency which it may possess will be due to its correspondence with that experience.

S- The Instruments of Psychology : External Observation. — Opposed to the internal process of observation stands the external one. By this we observe the mental phenomena of other beings than ourselves. Since this cannot be done directly, it must be done indirectly, that is, through those evidences of mental operations which can be observed by us. In ordinary life, language and gesture and written or printed signs are usually available for this lo PSYCHOLOGY.

purpose. Side by side with these intentional evidences, come unintentional ones which are not less instructive. Custom, in its various dresses of religious observance law fashion and art fine and not fine, may be made to yield very valuable results in the hands of a skilful psychologist. Of course the records of individual experience in books of travel, correspondence, diaries, and autobiographies, offer useful material. Of late, indeed, a powerful artistic tendency has come into play with the avowed aim of recording impressions and experiences on their inner, or subjective, side, in preference to their external side. In painting, the impressionists show how things would seem to you if you didn't know what they were. In literature, places situations and characters are tasted, so to speak, like tea by a tea-blender, and the practice is sometimes continued over a whole life, the results being gathered together in a journal. It would be a little rash, however, to take such observations as exactly true. When a diary is kept, an important consideration is what ought to be felt, no less than what is felt, and the two considerations do not always coincide in their effects. The alternate protestations of Marie Bashkirtseif that her journal was a photograph of her thoughts, and that it was an idealization of them, point to the two features of such records which must always be kept in view. Now she asks : "Why tell lies and play a part?" and assures her readers that she reveals herself completely. Soon after she warns

against a too ready belief : " I did not think of A as

I wrote. ... I idealized him to make it more like a romance." This observation of individuals by themselves has been undertaken further for a scientific purpose by the blind, the deaf and dumb, and the epileptic. Observations have also been made upon the earliest stages of child-life by

ON PSYCHOLOGICAL METHOD. ii

writers like Prayer, Darwin, and Taine. Somewhat similarly criminals, insane persons, and the subjects of hypnotic experiments have been observed for the purposes of psychology, and observations made by travellers upon savage races are a fruitful source of illustration and suggestion.

6. The Instruments of Psychology: Experiment. — Such, in brief, are the two time-honoured instruments of psychology, subjective and objective observation. Lately they have been supplemented by a third, experiment, and psychology is being converted into an experimental science. The acknowledged sacredness of the human personality will always tend to limit the scope of experiment to those mental phenomena which may be studied without damage to the physical organism, and without risking moral deterioration. The practice of vivisection has arisen in cases where danger of the first kind exists, as, for example, when it has been desired to trace out the functions of the various nervous structures ; and thus apes, dogs, and rabbits have found how perilous it is to exist as Things in a world of Persons. But scientific zeal is not always to be restrained even within these limits. " Bartholow, an American doctor, with a disregard for the human subject to which we have not attained in Europe, has reproduced on a man, whose brain was exposed by a gunshot wound, the experiments which Ferrier made on dogs" (Lagrange). The practice of hypnotizing persons for public entertainment, as at present performed by individuals without medical training and without a due sense of responsibility, is to be condemned both for the physical and the moral hurt to which its subjects are exposed, and is in reality not less obnoxious than cases of the kind just mentioned.

The experiments used to determine the relation of sensation to sensory stimulus, and similar experiments, do not fall under this ban if performed with due care ; they have already yielded a harvest even less notable in itself than as indicating the gradual transformation of psychology into an exact science. The observations of human faculty, which are being taken in anthropometrical laboratories, may be expected to lead to the determination of many important constants or units of measurement; for, of course, in all measurements one magnitude is compared with another ; numbers have no meaning unless we know what they stand for; and in order that the measurements taken by. one person may be understood by another, they must be expressed in terms which are known to this other. One of the chief requirements, therefore, of the psychologist is to have laid down the quality and amount of faculty which he may regard as the average, and by which, as a standard, he may measure any abnormalities. Following out this idea, psychological laboratories have been founded in various places — Leipsic, Berlin, Cambridge, Harvard, and elsewhere. Wundt led the way in founding the Leipsic laboratory,. and it may be taken as a type of the rest. "In 1879 rooms for the laboratory were set apart in the university buildings, the authorities also granted a yearly appropriation for the purchase of apparatus, and more recently a demonstrator with a salary has been appointed. . . . The students come from all quarters — it should be added, except from England — there are nearly always Americans and Russians, and often Scandinavians, Czechs, Greeks, and Frenchmen. The men work in groups, at least two are needed to carry on most psychological experiments, the one acting as subject, the other taking charge of the apparatus and registering the results. The chief inquiries pursued have been concerned with the analysis and measurement of sensation, the duration of mental processes, the time-sense, attention, memory, and the association of ideas." ^

7. Descriptive Psychology.— Such being the nature of the subject-matter, and such the instruments of psychology, this chapter will be appropriately concluded by considering what methods promise the best results. We might expect that the methods employed by natural history, which is the science most closely allied to psychology, would offer fruitful hints. The student of natural history has a double task. On the one hand he has to trace out the different groups in which animals may be arranged — here his work is descriptive ; on the other hand, he has to investigate the laws of their development, and for this purpose employs the inductive method. In a science like psychology, which also deals with phenomena of life, though of a very special kind, we may follow with advantage the method of natural history, and divide our treatment of the subject into descriptive and inductive. The first step, then, will be to enumerate the various species of conscious states. This process has already been roughly performed for themselves by the great mass of people in close connection with the theories of writers who happen to have caught their ear, and who usually belong to the age just past. The result is the familiar classification of mental facts into sensation, memory, imagination, judgment, feeling, emotion, purpose, desire, and so forth. Popular psychology not only owes much to the commonplaces of literature on the subject, it is also indebted to the purveyors of phrenological and other pseudo-scientific wares, who occupy in the study of mind a place corresponding to that of the vendors of quack drugs 1 Mind, xiii. 37.

in medicine. Conclusions so attained stand in need of the closest scrutiny, and indeed this task has always been regarded as preliminary by the expounders of new systems. The ideal to be followed is the grouping of mental phenomena under as few heads as is consistent with their different forms. An important step in this direction was that of the German, Mendelssohn, who made the triple division into thought, feeling, and will. Since his time various attempts have been made to reduce these principles to a single principle. The ways in which this has been done are very various. The most striking is, perhaps, the theory of Herbart, who regards all mental phenomena as forces which react on one another, and are therefore measured by their strength and not by any difference in quality.

The fact, however, that mental phenomena never occur singly, but always in some complex combination or other, stands in the way of a correct classification. Thought, feeling, and will do not lie side by side, as it were, like stones in a mosaic, any of which could be removed without destroying the rest ; they rather resemble the functions of the body, none of which are possible without the co-operation of all the others. A man's opinions, for example, are due not merely to his having reasoned them out, but more than he himself or others imagine, to favourite associations or personal pique. We should not be justified, therefore, in classifying his opinions as purely intellectual ; they also include emotional elements.

8. Cause and Effect in Psychology.^ — The causes which give rise to states of mind may be divided into states of mind and states of body. Thus the sensation of red is due to a light-stimulus received from some object by way of the

' See for this paragraph MilPs Logic, Book iii., cc. 8 and lo.

eye. Here a state of mind, the sensation of red, is caused by a state of body, namely, a change in the retina. All cases of this kind, in which a mental effect follows upon a physical cause, are instances of physical laws.

On the other hnnd, states of mind are very often due to previous states of mind, as when to us being in a reverie, one thought suggests another. Here a state of mind, the thought suggested, is caused by another state of mind, the thought which suggests. Cases like this, in which a mental effect follows upon a mental cause, are instances of mental laws.

In determining how particular states of mind give rise to one another, we are met by the same difficulty as was noticed with respect to classification. Thoughts, feelings, and purposes are entangled together almost inextricably. Thus, suppose that we were investigating the laws under which the sentiment of sympathy was generated, it would be impossible to produce, for the purpose of our investigation, a state of sympathy without at the same time heightening intellectual processes, and we could never be quite sure that these were not the cause of the sympathy. We feel deeply with others, when we have wide thoughts. Even assuming, therefore, that the fullest freedom of experiment were allowed, which, as a matter of fact, is almost inconceivable, all our results would be rendered faulty by being unable to vary one circumstance at a time. In respect, therefore, of the more complex states of mind, we may not hope to obtain such certainty as when Mill's Method of Difference can be employed. It is never possible in the study of mind, on its higher side, to introduce a single new factor into a set of circumstances which are perfectly known, and then to observe the difference which is caused by it. For the study of mind is made difficult not only by the complex conditions of each mental state, but also by the way in which the several effects of those conditions are blended, transformed, annulled in the state of mind to which they give rise. The consciousness of duty performed blends with the consciousness of healthy physical existence into the single feeling of well-being. We have to contend with a complication of the effects, as well as with a plurality of the causes. Each change in a concept, an emotion, a purpose, acts and reacts upon all the other elements of the same state of mind. We often find that a cherished ideal surrendered, or a new purpose formed, puts all the objects of our mental landscape in a new perspective.

This difificulty only holds with respect to those cases which have been distinguished above as instances of mental laws. Where, however, a sensation is produced by some external cause, the problem is much easier. Many converging associations point to the fact that we see by means of the eye, hear with the ear, and so forth. We have to deal here with physical laws, and can proceed according to physical methods. There is a special reason, too, why the mental modification which follows upon a sensory impression can be marked off from the other elements of the same state of mind. A sensation is an element which has not yet been brought into relation with the other contents of consciousness ; a sensation of red has no meaning until we connect it with other sensations ; but it is then no longer a simple sensation, it is part of a perception. Thus, in the investigation of a sensation, we can turn the attention aside from all those accompanying elements which obstruct our view of the more complex states of mind.

We have proceeded hitherto as if states of mind were due either to states of body or to other states of mind. Usually, however, they are due to these two sets of causes acting together. Hence, in enumerating the conditions which give rise to any state of consciousness, account must be taken of both. All the physiological processes involved in the life of the body are factors, so far as they affect, even in the most indirect manner, the state of the mind, and few, if any, are without such influence. Hence they demand notice no less than those previous states of mind, which alone perhaps are observed by us. And so even external objects, which in any way produce changes in the states of the body, are factors in the life of the mind. They may be marked off as the remoter, from the nearer or physiological, conditions of consciousness.