The Principles of Psychology
William James (1890)
Volume 1
Preface
Chapter 1. The Scope of Psychology
Chapter 2. The Functions of the Brain
Chapter 3. On Some General Conditions of Brain Activity
Chapter 4. Habit
Chapter 5. The Automaton Theory
Chapter 6. The Mind-Stuff Theory
Chapter 7. The Methods and Snares of Psychology
Chapter 8. The Relations of Minds to Other Things
Chapter 9. The Stream of Thought
Chapter 10. The Consciousness of Self
Chapter 11. Attention
Chapter 12. Conception
Chapter 13. Discrimination and Comparison
Chapter 14. Association
Chapter 15. The Perception of Time
Chapter 16. Memory
Volume 2
Chapter 17. Sensation
Chapter 18. Imagination
Chapter 19. The Perception of 'Things'
Chapter 20. The Perception of Space
Chapter 21. The Perception of Reality
Chapter 22. Reasoning
Chapter 23. The Production of Movement
Chapter 24. Instinct
Chapter 25. The Emotions
Chapter 26. Will
Chapter 27. Hypnotism
Chapter 28. Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience
CHAPTER I
The Scope of Psychology
Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions. The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like; and, superficially considered, their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic impression on the observer. The most natural and consequently the earliest way of unifying the material was, first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, to affiliate the diverse mental modes thus found, upon a sim-ple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are taken to be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for instance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its Appetite. This is the orthodox 'spiritualistic' theory of scholasticism and of common-sense. Another and a less obvious way of unifying the chaos is to seek common elements in the divers mental facts rather than a common agent behind them, and to explain them constructively by the various forms of arrangement of these elements, as one explains houses by stones and bricks. The 'associationist' schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hume, the Mills and Bain in Britain, have thus constructed a psychology without a soul by taking discrete 'ideas,' faint or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms [p.2] of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions,emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an individual's mind may be engendered. The very Self or ego of the individual comes in this way to be viewed no longer as the pre-existing source of the representations, but rather as their last and most complicated fruit.
Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena in either of these ways, we soon become aware of inadequacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for example, or recollection, is accounted for on the soul-theory by being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognition or of Memory. These faculties themselves are thought of as absolute properties of the soul; that is, to take the case of memory, no reason is given why we should remember a fact as it happened,except that so to remember it constitutes the essence of our Recollective Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our memory's failures and blunders by secondary causes. But its successes can invoke no factors save the existence of certain objective things to be remembered on the one hand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When, for instance, I recall my graduation-day, and drag all its incidents and emotions up from death's dateless night, no mechanical cause can explain this process, nor can any analysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seem other than an ultimate datum, which, whether we rebel or not at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for granted if we are to psychologize at all. However the associationist may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it 'ideas,' be it 'association,' knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an 'irreducible faculty,' he says no more than this admission of the associationist already grants.
And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory simplification of the concrete facts. For why should this absolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the events of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those [p.3] of an hour ago? Why, again, in old age should its。。。
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The Principles Of Psychology Vol I.pdf
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The Principles of Psychology Vol II.pdf
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