The Elements of Psychology CHAPTER I THE SUBJECT MATTER AND PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY § 1. Mental Facts On the The world is made up of physical and mental facts. On the one hand there are solids, liquids and gases, plants, trees and the bodies of animals, the stars and planets and their movements, the winds and clouds, and so on through the list of physical things and their movements. other hand are the thoughts and feelings of men and of other animals; ideas, opinions, memories, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains, smells, tastes, and so on through the list of states of mind. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, botany, zoology, geology and the other physical sciences deal with the former group of facts. Psychology, the science of mental facts or of mind, deals with the latter. Human psychology deals with the thoughts and feelings of human beings and seeks to explain the facts of intellect, character and personal life. How do you remember where you were a year ago? Why do we attend to certain sights and sounds and neglect others? What is the difference between an intelligent pupil and an idiot? What decides how large one shall judge an object to be? What happens when a student reasons out a problem in geometry? Such are the questions which the science of psychology tries to answer. These questions center about four leading topics: (1) The nature of the different kinds of thoughts and feelings. I (2) The purposes which they serve in life. (3) The ways in which they are related to the action of the brain or nervous system. (4) The laws which govern their behavior and that of the the bodily states and acts connected with them. E. g., psychology should give information about :(1) Just what attention is. : (2) In what way fear or pain is useful in the conduct of life. (3) How softening of the brain produces idiocy or how fever produces mental confusion. (4) Why thinking of one thing makes one think of a certain other thing, or why practice makes perfect. Its task thus concerns the description of mental states or processes, their function in nature, their relation to the nervous system and the general explanation of the part played by the mind in human life. Exercises I. Which of the following words refer to mental facts? Which refer to physical facts? Which refer sometimes to mental and sometimes to physical facts? Gas, tree, sympathy, money, desire, wish, dog, stone, dreams, headache, inventiveness, inch, pound, taste, intelligence, heavy, sour, oxygen, electricity, fatigue, pleasure, loud, observe, remember, image, teeth. 2. Under which topic, of (1), (2), (3) and (4) above, does each of the following questions belong? Is the fact that a thing gives pleasure a sign that it is good for us? What good does dreaming do? What is the difference between anger and hate? Why are certain people bad spellers in spite of much study? Why is it so much easier to say the alphabet forward than backward? Why does great sorrow make one unconscious of what goes on about him? What are the causes of exceptional musical ability? What are the causes of insanity? What feelings guide us to self-preservation? What feelings guide us to help other people to keep alive? 3. Which of the four aspects of psychology does each of the definitions of psychology given below emphasize? a. "Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions." (W. James). b. . . . “We note their resemblances, differences and other relations [the author is speaking of thoughts and feelings] and can thus coördinate them, place under one head those that are alike, and give them a name by which to speak of them.” McCosh). (J. C. "What these phenomena [thoughts and feelings] actually are, as conscious states and how they come to exist and follow each other in the order which they in fact assume, forms the primary subject of the investigations of psychology." (G. T. Ladd). d. The science of psychology attempts "(1) to analyze concrete (actual) mental experience into its simplest components, (2) to discover how these elements combine, what are the laws which govern their combination, and (3) to bring them into connection with their physiological [bodily] conditions." (E. B. Titchener). e. "The business of psychology is to furnish a systematic and coherent account of the flow of psychical process in its various forms, phases, and stages, and of the conditions on which it depends." (G. F. Stout). § 2. A General View of Mental States The Classification of Mental States.-A list of all the different kinds of thoughts and feelings that human beings have would exceed in length a list of the hundreds of thousands of animals and plants. For convenience psychology divides this total group of mental conditions into a few great classes. For instance, the feelings of joy, grief, anger, fear, sympathy and merriment, are alike among themselves in that each is a feeling, not of something in the outside world, but of some personal attitude or condition. All these and similar feelings are grouped together for study, the name used by psychologists in referring to the group being emotions. When you close your eyes and call up in imagination your father's face, or your room at home, when you call up the voice of a friend or the melody of a familiar song, you feel in each case some thing or condition, but as not present. All such feelings of things, qualities and conditions as not present are grouped together for study under the name mental images. To take another instance, the sound of a bell that you hear in a dream, the faces which a fever-patient sees in his delirium, the ghosts which still exist for the mind's eye, may all be classed together since they are all feelings of things as present when really nothing of the sort is actually present. Such feelings are called hallucinations. Some of the chief groups into which thoughts and feelings are classified are :— 9. Feelings concerned in the direction of conduct; states of will. Definitions of These Groups.-The exact nature of these groups will be made clear in later sections. For the present it will be sufficient to get a rough general idea of them. This can be done easily by making actual observations as follows: I. Sit near a hot stove. Touch yourself with a pencil. Bend your finger. Prick yourself with a pin. Listen to the tap of a stick on the floor. Hold a book at arm's length for one minute. The feelings of warmth, touch, movement, pain, sound, strain or fatigue and others like them are called Sensations. Sensations are feelings of qualities or conditions either of things or of one's own body. 2. Look at a picture. Listen to a chord or melody. Take hold of a key. You feel in each case some 'thing' that is present. Such feelings of things present are called Percepts. 3. Imagine to yourself the tune of Yankee Doodle. Imagine the feeling of velvet. Imagine the sight of the moon. Imagine that your arm is swinging back and forth. The feelings you have of the sound, the velvet, the moon and the arm-motion are called Mental Images. A mental image is the feeling of a thing or quality or condition when it is really not there and is felt not to be there. 4. Think what you were doing yesterday at one o'clock. Think of what you ate for dinner day before yesterday. Recall the feeling you have when you meet some one whom at first you do not remember but finally remember as having been with you at a certain place. These feelings are called Memories. |