Psychology, an account of the principal mental phenomena, with numerous examples; an exposition in popular form, designed for the use of students and of readers in general

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Preface

Billions of human beings must have Hved and died on this earth, yet in a sense the mind of every one of them was what the mind of any of us is. Knowledge of this sameness of mind is psychology.

Every human mind has sensations through the nerves, perceives things, dreams, remembers matters or forgets them, imagines impossible existences, conceives general notions, exercises judgment, reasons, systematizes, makes inventions, puts forth volitions, is subject to desires, affections, and emotions, has some purpose for living, and is connected with the past of the universe.

The question arises, in what way can this great theme best be set forth? the answer to which is that, for all purposes, no such way exists. There can be no final presentation of the subject of psychology, just as there can be no final translation of Homer. One presentation will be useful for one purpose, another for another. No account of the mind has been without its merits.

The design of the present attempt is to treat of the mind by means of examples, to show the great importance of the several aspects of mind from bodies of fact, it being hoped in this way to secure both clearness and point.

A great advantage of proceeding by examples is that the student is always able to follow up a case with examples which he may himself discover. The way is p

VI PREFACE

opened up for investigation; psychology is made teachable. It will be found, indeed, that every aspect of the mind has a world of facts of which it is the indwelling principle.

The endeavor is also here made to present the several topics of psychology systematically, so that the learner may the more readily acquire and retain the substance of what is stated.

The method of treatment here attempted, it is believed, will be especially useful not only to those just entering on the study of the mind, but also to those who wish to gather up their knowledge of the subject into one view. It should be useful to pupil and teacher, to clergyman and layman.

Any errors in citing examples which may have been made will easily be corrected, analogous examples being found, since the examples are always cited with the principle in view.

New York, July 19, 1904.

Chapter I Page

We are part mind and part body — Sensations of the skin and muscles relative to pain, heat, and resistance — ^Touch — Organ of giddiness — Sensations of taste, of smell, of hearing, and of seeing — Nervous system as a whole, means by which we get specific knowledge — The man without sensory nerves — Purpose of our constitution as part body and part mind » . i

Chapter II

Sight — We see only the ghosts of things — With the eyes we do not handle, hear, smell, or taste things, but seeing things we infer how they wiU feel, sound, etc. — We do not directly see thickness, shape, size, or distance — Time relations and motions not objects of direct perception — Persons bom blind and receiving their sight — Berkeley and Schopenhauer on sight — Only difference between ordinary dreaming and perception is the consistency arising from answering reality — Lotze's ideal realism — Hearing, tasting, smelling, and handling. . 23

Chapter III

Nature of dreams — ^Dreams are perceptive or cognitive, sleeping or waking, individual or communal — Dreams have meaning; their ordinary meaning is on the principle of figurative language — Their extraordinary meaning has reference to things, distance, and time — Dreams are taken as realities — Production of dreams by physical and by mental causes — Influence of dreams on our voluntary actions, on our organic functions, and on inorganic matter 46 vni CONTENTS

Chapter IV Page

Memory depends on conditions — Personal conditions are health and aptitude — Circumstances of life as early impressions and changes — Double memory — Persons possessed of spirits good or bad — Automatic writing — Intensity of things or vividness — Space as determining memory; position, multiplicity — Time, succession, simultaneity, and perpetuity — The relation of things; connection, classification, cross-reference. . , c .,,.... 72

Chapter V

The faculty of representing the impossible contrasted with conception — The six ways in which possibility can be represented are the six ways in which impossibility can be represented — Kant's categories — Impossible degree — Impossible time — Impossible size — Impossible properties — Impossible causation — Impossible composition, . „ » 97

Chapter VI

Simple apprehension gives us primitive notions — Notions of the inorganic: sky, ground, surroundings — Notions of the organic: Vegetable: trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, grains, herbs, roots, gourds, flowers, weeds, and moss — Animal: beasts, birds, fishes, shells, amphibians, lizards, serpents, insects, worms — Notions of the mental world, especially of utilities (lever, incline, bow, thread, bodkin, knife, vessel, vehicle), and of religion (monotheism, worship, messiahship, millennialism, sin, retribution, redemption, immortality) . . . . . .121

Chapter VII

Our notions are improved by our putting other notions in them, i. e., we affirm predicates of a subject — Applied to the inorganic — Homer's world — Learning to read — Analytic and synthetic judgments — Applied to the organic, vegetable and animal — Differences of judgment — Applied to the mental, particularly to practical affairs and to artistic matters „ . 145

CONTENTS

Chapter VIII

We know a predicate of a thing by a predicate of one of its predicates — Enthymeme — Syllogism — Mental image in reasoning — Language — Reasoning from equalization — Pythagorean theorem — Arithmetic and geometric progressions — Reasoning from consistency — Circumstantial evidence — Decipherments — Importance of reasoning on general principles — Reductio ad absurdum — Reasoning from dilemma, non-mathematical and mathematical — Reasoning from example, electricity and chemistry. . . , 170

Chapter IX

Mathematical systematization — Physical systematization — Biological systematization; botanic, zoological — Psychological systematization; grammatical, logical, ethical, aesthetical, and metaphysical. . . . 195

Chapter X

mVENTION

Mechanical invention — Chemical invention — Biological invention — ^Institutional invention — Artistic invention. , „ » . = .. » .215

Chapter XI

Materialization of a notion — Man an idea motor — Habit — ^Nervous determination of the will — Diseases, manias, instinctive actions — Dispositional determination of the will in animals and in men — Heredity — Deliberative determination of the will — Free-will — Qualitative determination of the will — Attractiveness, importance, and ease of mastery — Quantitative determination of the will; extensive, protensive, intensive — Relational determination of the will — Exclusion, inclusion, and part the one and part the other. . . . 238

X CONTENTS

CHAPTER Xn

PAGE

Feeling of wanting something, now principally feeling of wanting wealth, power, and fame, especially feeling of wanting property — Progress among animals in supplying wants; among savages — Peru as an example of stage attained among primitive civiUzed communities in satisfying desires — The Persian empire — Greece — Rome — Constantinople — Papacy — Protestancy — Modem world; machinery, business, schools, government 261

Chapter XIII

Depends on mutuality of participation — Family affections are conjugal, parental, filial, fraternal, nepotal — Friendship: Cicero's statement, Emerson's — Malevolence — AbnormaUty of envy, jealousy, and the like — Affection for animals, as for horses, cats, and dogs — Affection for plants — Affection for inanimate things, as for places and relics 287

Chapter XIV

Unity in variety — Sublime as extensive, dynamical, and moral — ^Pathetic, adjunct c5f sublime — Ludicrous — Beautiful in the sense of the symmetrical — ^Picturesque — ^Wonderfvil. ..312

Chapter XV

Nature of the mind shows its pvupose — Only possible ends are secularity and spirituality, the one standing for wealth, power, and fame, and the other for refinement, morality, religion, and knowledge — Secularity depends on spirituality — Knowledge is chief thing, since refinement, morality, and religion depend on it, and because truth, the object of knowledge, is the foundation of art, morality, and religion — Courses of study — History, Athens — Buddha, Fichte, Kant — ^Temple of Fame — Judgment pronounced on mankind. . . 336

CONTENTS xi

Chapter XVI Page

Disposed of to the extent it is shown that the mind had no origin — Materialistic consideration; unchangeability of matter; its similarity to mind — Infinite divisibihty — Moral consideration; freedom and necessity — Transmigration of souls — Reconciliation of the two opposing views — Creation from eternity — Axioms — Biological consideration; propagation by branching, by subdivision, and by eggs — Mammals — Man 360

INDEX 385

PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter I

It is a curious fact that we exist on this earth as part mind and part body, a fact not sufficiently taken into account. More curious still, the body is a machine of the mind by means of which the mind has sensations. What, then, are sensations? Nervous tinglings in the mind whereby it has intimations of things.

Sensations, according to the old division of them — which, indeed, for our purposes is accurate enough — are of five kinds, originated as they are from the skin and muscles, from the tongue, from the nose, from the ears, and from the eyes.

To take the first case, the brain, which is somehow the organ of the mind, is connected by the nerves with the skin and muscles, so that what affects the skin and muscles affects the mind also. What is more, the skin and muscles, taken by themselves, give rise to three kinds of sensations, namely, those of pain, those of heat, and those of resistance or pressure.

It seems strange, no doubt, to say that pain is in the mind, even bodily pain, yet such is the case. For, put your hand hurriedly into a brier-bush and you have a feehng of which you are deeply conscious, it being, therefore, in the mind.

We should have no feeling of pain in the body, however, but for the nerves, as indeed an example shows. It is known, for instance, that a mixture of salt and pounded ice, if applied for a time to the flesh, say of the arm, has the effect to render it almost insensible to pain, it being possible then to sear the flesh with a hot iron without creating any great pain. This mixture has the effect, indeed, to lessen the rapidity with which the blood circulates, whence we learn that we feel pain in the skin or muscles, only provided the circulation of the blood be up to a certain degree, strange as it may seem that the mind should be influenced by the swiftness of the blood.

We should not feel heat either were the nerves of the skin and muscles inactive. We have an example in the case of a scar. For where there is a scar, no matter how large it may be, there is no feeling of heat or cold, the nerves of heat having been destroyed. A negro having learned this fact, we are told, desired that he might have a horse, scar all over, as he did not wish to provide a stable for his horse in winter.

Neither should we feel the resistance of objects to the skin and muscles were it not for the nerves. Suppose the nerves of the skin do not do their duty. The patient is not able with his hands alone to distinguish an onion from an apple, not feeling the roughness or smoothness of things by means of the skin as we do. Suppose the nerves of the muscles do not do their duty. The patient does not know in the night-time where his limbs are, can, in fact, convince himself that he has limbs only by making a search for them, being unable to tell whether the muscles of them relax and contract or not.

Touch is a general term, sometimes used to designate the three feelings which have been considered, feeling of pain, feeling of heat, and feeling of resistance, it being understood, of course, that feelings the opposite of these are included in the designations.

The organ of giddiness, as it is called, is perhaps also a case of touch, for the semi-circular canals of the ear are supposed to be such an organ, a sort of spirit-level in the head, so to say, enabling us to keep our balance when we walk, the fluid in the canals, it being supposed, affecting the nerves in certain ways as we change position. Fishes are thought to know their position in the water by means of this organ. Deaf persons, it is said, — many of them at least — are not subject to dizziness as we are, the spirit-level in their heads having gotten out of order. They have the advantage, doubtless, that they are never sea-sick.

We have next to take into account that sensations of taste are dependent on the nerves.

This is proved in the first place by the action of drugs. In Africa and other parts of the world grows a vine, called gymnema, the leaves of which, if chewed, have the effect that for a certain time afterward sugar does not taste sweet. Were the nerves of the tongue continually in the condition gymnema puts them in, the whole business of the confectioner, as well as that of the sugar refiners, would be at an end. Gymnema also, whether in the form of the plant or in the form of the drug, makes quinine taste as chalk, not an unmixed evil, indeed.

Quinine taken in sweetened coffee, moreover, does not taste as bitter as it otherwise would, the coffee having some pecuHar effect on the tongue.

A form of cocaine, known as hydrochlorate, exercises such a power over the nerves of the tongue that nothing whatsoever for a time tastes bitter. One relates that in his boyhood he tasted aloes in the evening and could still taste it in the morning. If, however, previously to his tasting it, he had put into his mouth hydrochlorate of cocaine, he would not have had this experience.

Diseases of various kinds show the dependence of taste on nervous conditions. Jaundice, for example, has the effect to produce a bitter taste in the mouth ; diabetes, a sweetish one. Certain people in Georgia are known as clay-eaters, for, owing to an abnormal condition of their bodies, they eat earthy matter with a relish. And persons suffering from certain maladies are known to crave for ashes and even for slate-pencils to eat. V" Different parts of the tongue are appropriated to different uses, this again showing the necessity of the nerves to taste. It seems that in general the tip of the tongue is more sensitive to what is sweet, the back of the tongue to what is bitter. Darwinians say we can easily tell what our ancestors ate ages ago, those nuts, fruits, roots, and the like, which are sweet or sweetish to the taste. Primeval animals, they say, selected their food by means of the tongue. Whatever was pungent or acidulous they rejected. Other things taken into the mouth were thrown out if bitter, most bitter things being harmful, strychnine, for instance. We, of a truth, with our vast quantities of sugar and sweetmeats, live in what was to primeval man the sweet by-and-by.

The dependence of taste on the nerves is farther exemplified in that the tongues of persons differ. One person, for example, tastes sweet better with one part of the tongue, and another person with another part of the tongue.

Moreover, the fact that it takes time to taste anything proves that the nerves are indispensable to taste. The effect of quinine on the tongue, for example, was found in a certain experiment to require 2,196 ten thousandths of a second to travel from the tongue to the brain, that of sugar only 1,639 ^^^ thousandths of a second^ the sweet effect travelling faster than the bitter.

The delicacy of taste is still another thing which demonstrates that we have to have nerves to taste things. For example, a smaller portion of quinine than of sugar can be tasted with the tongue, the nerves of it being more sensitive for the one than for the other. Should we take three hundred and ninety thousand parts of water with which to mix one part of quinine, a man could yet taste the quinine in each and every portion of the mixture. Sugar, on the contrary, a man cannot taste in such small, though yet in very small, quantities. In order that he may taste it in each and every part of the mixture we cannot take more than one hundred and ninety-nine thousand parts of water to put with one of sugar, that is to say, if there were two hundred thousand parts of water a man could not taste the sugar. But women can taste smaller quantities of things than men can taste, the nerves of their tongues being somehow different from those of men. When four hundred and fifty-six thousand parts of water are mixed with one of quinine, women can still taste bitter in each and every part of the entire mixture. Sweet they can so taste when two hundred and four thousand parts of water are mixed with one of sugar.

Thirdly, it is by means of the nerves — namely, those of the nose — that we smell things.

Nothing can be smelled at all unless it is capable of affecting the nose in certain definite ways. Hydrogen, for example, is one of those things which nobody ever smells, the reason which some assign for this being that its particles vibrate so extraordinarily fast that they do not have time to be smelled. A particle of hydrogen, it is said, vibrates forty-four hundred thousand billion times a second, to do which, it would seem, it must in a second move through a distance many times that around the earth, another instance in which truth may be stranger than fiction.

An example of how the nerves are affected in definite ways to produce particular smells is furnished by arsenic and sulphur, the bad smell of so many things being due, as is supposed, to the presence of one or the other of these ingredients. For instance, green paper when burning has a disagreeable odor on account of the arsenic in it, and sulphuretted hydrogen, one of the worst smelling things in the world, gets its odor from sulphur.

The fact that the sense of smell can be dulled by applying to the nose certain drugs shows likewise the part the nerves play in smell. We have the case of men, for example, who being obliged to work amid the intolerable odors of a soap factory were able to do so by using as snuff a certain mixture of sugar and morphine, this having the effect to paralyze temporarily the nasal nerves.

It is said, also, that a man who snuffed this preparation made a good living by showing, for a price, how he could smell of a bottle of which nobody else could sniff; but one day he had, by mistake, used strychnine instead of morphine, thus forming a mixture which increases the power of smell. He snuffed this, and, uncorking his bottle, brought it close to his nose, his failure then being most ludicrous.

Certain diseases of the nose render smelling impossible, a thing which could not be were smell not dependent on the nerves. A Dutchman, the nerves of whose nose were totally paralyzed, was entrusted to take two small boys from one place to another, not knowing their language, nor they his. Coming into the vicinity of a slaughter-house, which was concealed from view by trees and shrubbery, he was surprised to observe that the boys manifested great uneasiness and unwillingness to proceed — he had, as a matter of fact, to drive them past the place with a stick. Presently, however, arriving at a place where was a flower garden hidden from sight by a wall, he was puzzled to know why the boys were pleased with it and manifested a desire to linger there.

The dependence of smell on the nerves is also exemplified in animals which do not have these nerves. Most whales, for example, have no nerves of smell. If one of this kind, therefore, were approaching the island of Ceylon, he could not be apprised of the fact; he could not smell the spice-laden breezes as the sailors smell them. A whale of this kind could have swum up Chicago River when it was in its most filthy condition, previous to the opening of the Drainage Canal, without experiencing the least annoyance, what to us must seem miraculous.

What has been said has special importance owing to the use of smell. Dogs, as we know, live in a world of smells, so to say, and are serviceable chiefly on that account, as an example will show. Some convicts had escaped one night from the jail of a country town, but, greatly to their misfortune, it so happened that a showman had been the same night in the town with several bloodhounds. The dogs, taken to the jail by the officers, smelled about, and, finding the trail, overtook the convicts before dawn. The scented air rising from the tracks of the men had some peculiar effect on the nerves of the dogs' noses, causing in the minds of the dogs certain sensations which were to the dogs signs that the tracks were those of the men who had been in the jail. Without these sensations the dogs could not have tracked the men. We read that Bruce, the Scottish Chieftain, being pursued by bloodhounds, eluded them. For, reaching a brook in advance of the dogs, he waded a distance in the water, and then got up into a tree by means of an overhanging limb. The dogs coming to the brook were unable to follow him, the tracks, so to say, having been washed down stream.

Romanes made an experiment of importance. Eleven men walked behind him, each stepping in his tracks. His dog was afterward put upon the trail and succeeded in finding him, being able to smell out his master's tracks under the eleven others.

We have the instance of a dog which walked nearly a thousand miles to get back to the place from which it had been taken, an event so notable that a monument was erected to the dog.

Turtles, going good distances through the sea, find Ascension Island, there to deposit their eggs, a place which sailors themselves cannot find without calculating its latitude and longitude.

It has, indeed, been objected to the theory that animals are guided by smell in finding their way that they do not always go the same route, do not, for example, always return home by precisely the same route as was followed when they were taken from home; but this is nothing to the point. For, on similar grounds, it could be proved that we make no use of sight in finding our way home, since we often return to our home some other way than we came from it.

Working ants, it is said, do not carry on business on the basis of sight at all, not being able to see very much, but carry on business on the basis of smell altogether.

It is a mistake to suppose that men even are not assisted by smell. A certain blind man, we are told, could by smell alone tell if cats were in the house, notwithstanding the fact that several doors intervened between him and them. A blind man, named Mitchell, knew by smell, it is asserted, what were the characters of men, whether, for example, one was a rogue, a miser, or what not. But why do we speak of this when there is Jaeger? This eminent man, a designer of woolen clothes, claims to have proved that every nation, kindred, tribe, family, and individual may be known by the smell, thinks that even the secret of heredity can be gotten at by it, the soul itself discovered.

It is strange, for a fact, how small a thing can be recognized by smell. If the third part of an ounce of musk be divided into a thousand parts, and each of these into another thousand, and finally the last parts into a hundred each, we can yet smell these smallest parts, any one of them by itself. A piece of musk will scent a room for years without any perceptible loss of weight, though it would seem that some of that musk must be in every part of the room continually, to say nothing of what is wafted away.

Smell has importance even as related to cookery, what we call tasting things being for the most part smelling them, For example, if a blind man were to hold his nose he could not from the taste alone tell whether he were eating beef, mutton, or pork. A man blindfolded and his nose held cannot tell by tasting them a slice of onion from a slice of apple as one after the other is laid on his tongue. At the table it is not the flavors of things that delight us, but their smell, for, as we have said, we taste nothing but sour and salt, bitter and sweet.

Not only the food itself, but the accompaniments of the feast, were made to minister to smell by the ancients. Athenseus relates that, at the banquet he has described, the dishes had been made by baking perfumed clay with aromatic woods as fuel. Other cases of the ornamental uses of odors were found in the Roman theatres, the air of which was perfumed. Incense in houses of worship was another instance. Somebody proposes that we have galleries of smells, just as we have galleries of pictures. The Japanese actually do have a game of smells, this possibly taking the place of billiards with us, the game consisting in the matching of smells, a hundred and twenty being in common use.

Fourthly, the hearing of sounds takes place by means of nerves, the nerves pertaining to the ears. For, except on the supposition that certain other persons' ears differ from ours in their nervous make-up, how shall we account for the fact that they can hear notes an octave higher than any which we can hear ? Birds, it is believed, can hear the crawling of worms in the earth, and are thus enabled to find them. For all we know to the contrary, insects may be able to hear the growth of the grass, the ascent of sap in trees.

Defects of hearing teach us the same thing. For there was once, as is known, a man by the name of Cowles who could hear most things as well as any of us can hear them, but who could not in the least hear the sibilant sound in words which we represent by the letter s, whence, in speaking, he did not utter this sound at all. What was stranger still, he did not hear the songs of birds. Putting his ear close to a cage in which canaries were warbling, he could not catch the slightest sound. He was about twenty-five years of age when he made this discovery, and up to that time, whenever he heard anybody speak of the songs of birds or read about any such thing, he supposed that the language was figurative; he had no idea that it described a reality. Birds, he supposed, were mute. He could not hear a fife or a piano, and must have thought that persons playing these instruments were merely taking gymnastic exercise.

It only remains now to show how sight, like the other senses, depends on the nerves.

To do this we have, in the first instance, to mention the effects of santonine on the nerves of the eyes. It so happened, it is said, that a boy who was accustomed to see the stars and stripes floating from the schoolhouse near where he lived^ one day saw that the flag was yellow; but when speaking to his mother about the matter, she assured him that the flag was just the same as it had always been. The truth is the boy had been given a dose of santonine for a vermifuge, this drug having the effect, by its action on the nerves of the eyes, to make things look yellow. What better example, then, could we have to show that knowledge gained by the eyes depends on the state of the nerves, not merely in general, but in particular?

Another example, however, may make the matter plainer — the fact that some persons cannot tell black from scarlet, the nerves of their eyes somehow differing from ours. Wilson, indeed, tells of an undertaker who covered a coffin with scarlet cloth, thinking it black. We have also the ludicrous example of an old bachelor, who lived alone by himself, on whom his friends played a practical joke. In collusion with the tailor they caused to have made for him a scarlet suit instead of the black one which he had ordered. He, not perceiving any difference between the two colors, appeared next Sunday at church in this gay attire, much to the merriment of the people. Moreover, Quakers, it is said, were often imposed on in this way. They had scruples against exhibiting themselves in showy gowns on festive occasions, but were given scarlet instead of black ones, without their knowing the difference, they being persons, of course, whom their friends knew to be unable to distinguish red from black.

Again, an orange, which to us appears yellowish, it is said, appears whitish to one who has taken a certain preparation of cocaine in a certain dose. Moreover, it has often been asserted that there are persons who cannot tell gold from silver coins, if the coins are of the same size, and it has been inferred consequently that what is yellowish to us they see as if it were whitish. Such a person, it is presumed, would also see an orange as whitish. To some, too, an orange looks blackish, they seeing no colors as we do, but merely lights and shades, things appearing to them as they do to us in engravings. Huddart, more than one hundred and fifty years ago, wrote of a man who was unable to distinguish an orange from an apple except by its shape. If, then, all those who see oranges different should ever get together, what a bedlam there would be! For some of them would maintain that oranges are white, others that they are black, we ourselves that they are yellow.