The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1

by William James

Overview

"For the psychologist, standard reading, to all readers, a classic of interpretation." — Psychiatric Quarterly
This is the first inexpensive edition of the complete Long Course in Principles of Psychology, one of the great classics of modern Western literature and science and the source of the ripest thoughts of America’s most important philosopher. As such, it should not be confused with the many abridgements that omit key sections.
The book presents lucid descriptions of human mental activity, with detailed considerations of the stream of thought, consciousness, time perception, memory, imagination, emotions, reason, abnormal phenomena, and similar topics. In its course it takes into account the work of Berkeley, Binet, Bradley, Darwin, Descartes, Fechner, Galton, Green, Helmholtz, Herbart, Hume, Janet, Kant, Lange, Lotze, Locke, Mill, Royce, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Wundt, and scores of others. It examines contrasting interpretations of mental phenomena, treating introspective analysis, philosophical interpretations, and experimental research.
Although the book originally appeared nearly 75 years ago, it remains unsurpassed today as a brilliantly written survey of William James’ timeless view of psychology.
"Rereading James brings a sense of perspective and even a little humility to our regard for more modern achievements." — Journal of Consulting Psychology

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486203812
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	06/01/1950
Series:	Dover Books on Biology, Psychology and Medicine
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	720
Sales rank:	223,305
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

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The Principles of Psychology

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By William James

Dover Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 1918 Alice H. James
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-12349-3

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CHAPTER 1

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY.

PSYCHOLOGY is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and 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 simple 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 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 of an hour ago ? Why, again, in old age should its grasp of childhood's events seem firmest ? Why should illness and exhaustion enfeeble it ? Why should repeating an experience strengthen our recollection of it ? Why should drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things long since forgotten ? If we content ourselves with merely affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly constituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation becomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with which we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and irrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped with elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort. Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than the remote ? Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner than of abstract names ? Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic ; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the faculty does not exist absolutely, but works under conditions ; and the quest of the conciitions becomes the psycliologist's most interesting task.

However firmly he may hold to the soul and her remembering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must always precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect. "An idea !" says the associationist, "an idea associated with the remembered thing; and this explains also why things repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their associates on the various occasions furnish so many distinct avenues of recall." But this does not explain the effects of fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And in general, the pure associationist's account of our mental life is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist. This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope,—whence do they get their fantastic laws of clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do ?

For this the associationist must introduce the order of experience in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is a copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phenomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our remembering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow undergone it, we shall never know of its having been. The experiences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although every other organ in the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating through the brain, or to pathological changes in that organ's substance. The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct.

Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those conditions of the mentallife of which Psychology need take account. The spiritualist and the associationist must both be 'cerebralists,' to the extent at least of admitting that certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of the result.

Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology.

In still another way the pyschologist is forced to be something of a nerve-physiologist. Mental phenomena are not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily processes; but they lead to them a parte post. That they lead to acts is of course the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely mean acts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscular performances. Mental states occasion also changes in the calibre of blood-vessels, or alteration in the heart-beats, or processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If these are taken into account, as well as acts which follow at some remote period because the mental state was once there, it will be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. The ideas and feelings, e.g., which these present printed characters excite in the reader's mind not only occasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements of articulation in him, but will some day make him speak, or take sides in a discussion, or give advice, or choose a book to read, differently from what would have been the case had they never impressed his retina. Our psychology must therefore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one's prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semiautomatic, and the reflex acts of self-preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelligent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the animals' consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims. Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as these be included in Psychology?

The boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague. It is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these if by so doing we can throw any light on the main business in hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can; and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrow conception of our subject. At a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility. On the whole, few recent formulas have done more real service of a rough sort in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and of bodily life are one, namely, 'the adjustment of inner to outer relations.' Such a formula is vagueness incarnate; but because it takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile than the old-fashioned ' rational psychology,' which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties. I shall therefore feel free to make any sallies into zoology or into pure nerve-physiology which may seem instructive for our purposes, but otherwise shall leave those sciences to the physiologists.

Can we state more distinctly still the manner in which the mental life seems to intervene between impressions made from without upon the body, and reactions of the body upon the outer world again? Let us look at a few facts.

If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a magnet brought near them, they will fly through the air for a certain distance and stick to its surface. A savage seeing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an attraction or love between the magnet and the filings. But let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filings will press forever against its surface without its ever occurring to them to pass around its sides and thus come into more direct contact with the object of their love. Blow bubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water, they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Their action may again be poetically interpreted as due to a longing to recombine with the mother-atmosphere above the surface. But if you invert a jar full of water over the pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom, shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflection from their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards the rim of the jar when they found their upward course impeded, would easily have set them free.

If now we pass from such actions as these to those of living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water. The want of breath will soon make him also long to rejoin the mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest path to his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jar full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until by re-descending again he has discovered a path round its brim to the goal of his desires. Again the fixed end, the varying means!

Such contrasts between living and inanimate performances end by leading men to deny that in the physical world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air. No one supposes now that the end of any activity which they may display is an ideal purpose presiding over the activity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it into being by a sort of vis a fronte. The end, on the contrary, is deemed a mere passive result, pushed into being a tergo, having had, so to speak, no voice in its own production. Alter the pre-existing conditions, and with inorganic materials you bring forth each time a different apparent end. But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes the activity displayed, but not the end reached; for here the idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the conditions to determine what the activities shall be.

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.

Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute external fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in contemplating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of something, we place intelligence at the heart of it and have a religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Principles of Psychology by William James. Copyright © 1918 Alice H. James. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1
THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY
Mental Manifestations depend on Cerebral Conditions
Pursuit of ends and choice are the marks of Mind's presence
CHAPTER II
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN
"Reflex, semi-reflex, and voluntary acts"
The Frog's nerve centres
General notion of the hemispheres
Their Education-the Meynert scheme
The phrenological contrasted with the physiological conception
The localization of function in the hemisphere
The motor zone
Motor Aphasia
The sight-centre
Mental blindness
The hearing-centre
Sensory Aphasia
Centres for smell and taste
The touch-centre
Man's Consciousness limited to the hemispheres
The restitution of function
Final correction of the Meynert scheme
Conclusions
CHAPTER III.
ON SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY
The summation of Stimuli
Reaction-time
Cerebral blood-supply
Cerebral Thermometry
Phosphorus and Thought
CHAPTER IV.
HABIT
Due to plasticity of neural matter
Produces ease of action
Diminishes attention
Concatenated performances
Ethical implications and pedagogic maxims
CHAPTER V.
THE AUTOMATON-THEORY
The theory described
Reasons for it
Reasons against it
CHAPTER VI.
THE MIND-STUFF THEORY
Evolutionary Psychology demands a Mind-dust
Some alleged proofs that it exists
Refutation of these proofs
Self-compounding of mental facts is inadmissible
Can states of mind be unconscious?
Refutation of alleged proofs of unconscious thought
Difficulty of stating the connection between mind and brain
The Soul' is logically the least objectionable hypothesis
Conclusion
CHAPTER VII.
THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology is a natural Science
Introspection
Experiment
Sources of error
The 'Psychologists fallacy'
CHAPTER VIII.
THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS
Time relations : lapses of Consciousness
Locke v. Descartes
The 'unconsciousness' of hysterics not genuine
Minds may split into dissociated parts
Space-relations : the Seat of the Soul
Cognitive relations
The Psychologist's point of view
"Two kinds of knowledge, acquaintance and knowledge about"
CHAPTER IX.
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT
Consciousness tends to the personal form
It is in constant change
It is sensibly continuous
Substantive' and 'transitive' parts of Consciousness
Feelings of relation
Feelings of tendency
The 'fringe' of the object
The feeling of rational sequence
Thought possible in any kind of mental material
Thought and language
Consciousness is cognitive
The word Object
Every cognition is due to one integral pulse of thought
Diagrams of Thought's stream
Thought is always selective
CHAPTER X
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF
The Empirical Self or Me
Its constituents
The material self
The Social Self
The Spiritual Self
Difficulty of apprehending Thought as a purely spiritual activity
Emotions of Self
Rivalry and conflict of one's different selves
Their hierarchy
What Self we love in 'Self-love'
The Pure Ego
The verifiable ground of the sense of personal identity
The passing Thought is the only Thinker which Psychology requires
Theories of Self-consciousness:
1) The theory of the Soul
2) The Associationist theory
3) The Transcendentalist theory
The mutations of the Self
Insane delusions
Alternative selves
Mediumships or possessions
Summary
CHAPTER XI.
ATTENTION
Its neglect by English psychologists
Description of it
To how many things can we attend at once?
Wundt's experiments on displacement of date of impressions simultaneously attend to
Personal equation
The varieties of attention
Passive attention
Voluntary attention
Attention's effect on sensation; on discrimination; on recollection; on reaction-time
The neural process in attention:
1) Accommodation of sense-organ
2) Preperception
Is voluntary attention a resultant or a force?
The effort to attend can be conceived as a resultant
Conclusion
Acquired Inattention
CHAPTER XII.
CONCEPTION
The sense of sameness
Conception defined
Conceptions are unchangeable
Abstract ideas
Universals
The conception 'of the same' is not the 'same state' of mind
CHAPTER XIII.
DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON
Locke on discrimination
Martineau ditto
Simultaneous sensations originally fuse into one object
The principle of mediate comparison
Not all differences are differences of composition
The conditions of discrimination
The sensation of differences
The transcendentalist theory of the perception of differences uncalled for
The process of analysis
The process of abstraction
The improvement of discrimination by practice
Its two causes
Practical interests limit our discrimination
Reaction-time after discrimination
The perception of likeness
The magnitude of differences
The measurement of criminative sensibility : Weber's law
Fechner's interpretation of this as the psycho-physic law
Criticism thereof
CHAPTER XIV.
ASSOCIATION
The problem of the connection of our thoughts
It depends on mechanical conditons
"Association is of objects thought-of, not of 'ideas'"
The rapidity of association
The 'law of contiguity'
The elementary law of association
Impartial redintegration
Ordinary or mixed association
The law of interest
Association by similarity
Elementary expression of the difference be