Transcription of The Principles of Psychology-Volume I - Manipal Academy of ...
1 William James (1842-1910)The Principles Of PsychologyVolume IBy William James (1890)The Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James2 Contents - Click on the Links Below orUse the BookmarksChapter 1. The Scope of PsychologyChapter 2. The Functions of the BrainChapter 3. On Some General Conditions ofBrain ActivityChapter 4. HabitChapter 5. The Automaton TheoryChapter 6. The Mind-Stuff TheoryChapter 7. The Methods and Snares ofPsychologyChapter 8. The Relations of Minds to OtherThingsChapter 9. The Stream of ThoughtChapter 10. The Consciousness of SelfChapter 11. AttentionChapter 12. ConceptionChapter 13. Discrimination and ComparisonChapter 14. AssociationChapter 15. The Perception of TimeChapter 16.
2 MemoryThe Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James3 CHAPTER IThe Scope of PsychologyPsychology is the Science of Mental Life,both of its phenomena and of their conditions. Thephenomena are such things as we call feelings,desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and thelike; and, superficially considered, their variety andcomplexity is such as to leave a chaotic impressionon the observer. The most natural and consequentlythe earliest way of unifying the material was, first,to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, toaffiliate the diverse mental modes thus found, upona simple entity, the personal Soul, of which they aretaken to be so many facultative , for instance, the Soul manifests its faculty ofMemory, now of Reasoning, now of Volition, or againits Imagination or its Appetite.
3 This is the orthodox'spiritualistic' theory of scholasticism and ofcommon-sense. Another and a less obvious way ofunifying the chaos is to seek common elements inthe divers mental facts rather than a common agentThe Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James4behind them, and to explain them constructively bythe various forms of arrangement of these elements,as one explains houses by stones and bricks. The'associationist' schools of Herbart in Germany, andof Hume, the Mills and Bain in Britain, have thusconstructed a psychology without a soul by takingdiscrete 'ideas,' faint or vivid, and showing how, bytheir cohesions, repulsions, and forms ofsuccession, such things as reminiscences,perceptions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories,and all the other furnishings of an individual's mindmay be engendered.
4 The very Self or ego of theindividual comes in this way to be viewed no longeras the pre-existing source of the representations,but rather as their last and most complicated , if we strive rigorously to simplify thephenomena in either of these ways, we soonbecome aware of inadequacies in our method. Anyparticular cognition, for example, or recollection, isaccounted for on the soul-theory by being referredto the spiritual faculties of Cognition or of Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James5 These faculties themselves are thought of asabsolute properties of the soul; that is, to take thecase of memory, no reason is given why we shouldremember a fact as it happened, except that so toremember it constitutes the essence of ourRecollective Power.
5 We may, as spiritualists, try toexplain our memory's failures and blunders bysecondary causes. But its successes can invoke nofactors save the existence of certain objective thingsto be remembered on the one hand, and of ourfaculty of memory on the other. When, for instance,I recall my graduation-day, and drag all its incidentsand emotions up from death's dateless night, nomechanical cause can explain this process, nor canany analysis reduce it to lower terms or make itsnature seem other than an ultimate datum, which,whether we rebel or not at its mysteriousness, mustsimply be taken for granted if we are topsychologize at all.
6 However the associationist mayrepresent the present ideas as thronging andarranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, heThe Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James6has in the end to admit that something, be it brain,be it 'ideas,' be it 'association,' knows past time aspast, and fills it out with this or that event. Andwhen the spiritualist calls memory an 'irreduciblefaculty,' he says no more than this admission of theassociationist already yet the admission is far from being asatisfactory simplification of the concrete facts. Forwhy should this absolute god-given Faculty retain somuch better the events of yesterday than those oflast year, and, best of all, those of an hour ago?
7 Why, again, in old age should its grasp ofchildhood's events seem firmest? Why should illnessand exhaustion enfeeble it? Why should repeatingan experience strengthen our recollection of it? Whyshould drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitementresuscitate things long since forgotten? If wecontent ourselves with merely affirming that thefaculty of memory is so peculiarly constituted bynature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seemlittle the better for having invoked it, for ourThe Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James7explanation becomes as complicated as that of thecrude facts with which we started. Moreover there issomething grotesque and irrational in thesupposition that the soul is equipped withelementary powers of such an ingeniously intricatesort.
8 Why should our memory cling more easily tothe near thanthe remote? Why should it lose itsgrasp of proper sooner than of abstract names?Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic; and might,for aught we can see a priori, be the preciseopposites of what they are. Evidently, then, thefaculty does not exist absolutely, but works underconditions; and the quest of the conditions becomesthe psychologist's most interesting firmly he may hold to the soul andher remembering faculty, he must acknowledge thatshe never exerts the latter without a cue, and thatsomething must always precede and remind us ofwhatever we are to recollect. "An idea!" says theassociationist, "an idea associated with theremembered thing; and this explains also whyThe Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James8things repeatedly met with are more easilyrecollected, for their associates on the variousoccasions furnish so many distinct avenues ofrecall.
9 " But this does not explain the effects of fever,exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And ingeneral, the pure associationist's account of ourmental life is almost as bewildering as that of thepure spiritualist. This multitude of ideas, existingabsolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving anendless carpet of themselves, like dominoes inceaseless change, or the bits of glass in akaleidoscope,-whence do they get their fantasticlaws of clinging, and why do they cling in just theshapes they do?For this the associationist must introduce theorder of experience in the outer world. The dance ofthe ideas is a copy, somewhat mutilated andaltered, of the order of phenomena.
10 But the slightestreflection shows that phenomena have absolutely nopower to influence our ideas until they have firstimpressed our senses and our brain. The bareThe Principles of Psychology Volume I - William James9existence of a past fact is no ground for ourremembering it. Unless we have seen it, orsomehow undergone it, we shall never know of itshaving been. The experiences of the body are thusone of the conditions of the faculty of memory beingwhat it is. And a very small amount of reflection onfacts shows that one part of the body, namely, thebrain, is the part whose experiences are directlyconcerned. If the nervous communication be cut offbetween the brain and other parts, the experiencesof those other parts are non-existent for the eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensibleand motionless.
