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The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
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About this book
The work is a scholarly treatise on psychology written by William James in 1890, intended originally for his university lectures. Its opening explains that the book grew out of classroom instruction, but warns that some chapters are “more ‘metaphysical,’ and others fuller of detail” than a first‑time student might need. James even suggests a reading plan that skips a number of middle chapters and jumps from chapter 4 to chapters 23‑26 before returning to the start, indicating the massive scope of fourteen hundred pages. The author frames psychology as a natural science that assumes only thoughts, feelings, and a physical world, and he explicitly rejects both associationist and spiritualist explanations as metaphysical. The introductory passage therefore sets the tone for a dense, descriptive survey that prioritizes empirical correlation between mental states and brain conditions, while leaving deeper philosophical questions to later inquiry.
James’s voice is that of a late‑Victorian scholar, methodical, occasionally self‑critical, and steeped in the language of his time. The style mixes long, clause‑laden sentences with frequent citations of contemporary philosophers and scientists, reflecting the academic conventions of the 1890s. Readers who relish rigorous historical perspectives on the foundations of psychology, or who enjoy navigating a richly detailed, albeit demanding, exposition of brain functions, perception, and consciousness, will find this volume rewarding. It is especially suited to students of the history of science, philosophers interested in the early demarcation of psychology from metaphysics, and anyone prepared to engage with a work that values precise description over narrative ease.
The opening · free to read
I have kept close to the point of view of natural science throughout the book. Every natural science assumes certain data uncritically, and declines to challenge the elements between which its own 'laws' obtain, and from which its own deductions are carried on. Psychology, the science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know. Of course these data themselves are discussable; but the discussion of them (as of other elements) is called metaphysics and falls outside the province of this book. This book, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychology when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain, can go no farther--can go no farther, that is, as a natural science. If she goes farther she becomes metaphysical. All attempts to explain our phenomenally given thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities (whether the latter be named 'Soul,' 'Transcendental Ego,' 'Ideas,' or 'Elementary Units of Consciousness') are metaphysical. This book consequently rejects both the associationist and the spiritualist theories; and in this strictly positivistic point of view consists the only feature of it for which I feel tempted to claim originality. Of course this point of view is anything but ultimate. Men must keep thinking; and the data assumed by psychology, just like those assumed by physics and the other natural sciences, must some time be overhauled. The effort to overhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics; but metaphysics can only perform her task well when distinctly conscious of its great extent. Metaphysics fragmentary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she injects herself into a natural science. And it seems to me that the theories both of a spiritual agent and of associated 'ideas' are, as they figure in the psychology-books, just such metaphysics as this. Even if their results be true, it would be as well to keep them, as thus presented, out of psychology as it is to keep the results of idealism out of physics.
I have therefore treated our passing thoughts as integers, and regarded the mere laws of their coexistence with brain-states as the ultimate laws for our science. The reader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book. It is mainly a mass of descriptive details, running out into queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can hope successfully to deal with. That will perhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best mark of health that a science can show is this unfinished-seeming front.
The completion of the book has been so slow that several chapters have been published successively in Mind, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the Popular Science Monthly, and Scribner's Magazine. Acknowledgment is made in the proper places.
The bibliography, I regret to say, is quite unsystematic. I have habitually given my authority for special experimental facts; but beyond that I have aimed mainly to cite books that would probably be actually used by the ordinary American college-student in his collateral reading. The bibliography in W. Volkmann von Volkmar's Lehrbuch der Psychologie (1875) is so complete, up to its date, that there is no need of an inferior duplicate. And for more recent references, Sully's Outlines, Dewey's Psychology, and Baldwin's Handbook of Psychology may be advantageously used.
Finally, where one owes to so many, it seems absurd to single out particular creditors; yet I cannot resist the temptation at the end of my first literary venture to record my gratitude for the inspiration I have got from the writings of J. S. Mill, Lotze, Renouvier, Hodgson, and Wundt, and from the intellectual companionship (to name only five names) of Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce in old times, and more recently of Stanley Hall, James Putnam, and Josiah Royce.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, August 1890.
CONTENTS.
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 hemispheres. 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.
Habit
Due to plasticity of neural matter. Produces ease of action. Diminishes attention, 115. Concatenated performances. Ethical implications and pedagogic maxims.
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.
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.
The Stream of Thought, 224
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.
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. Alternating selves. Mediumships or possessions. Summary.
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 attended to. Personal equation. The varieties of attention. Passive attention. Voluntary attention. Attention's effects 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.
Conception
The sense of sameness. Conception defined. Conceptions are unchangeable. Abstract ideas, 468. Universals. The conception 'of the same' is not the 'same state' of mind.
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 difference. 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, 528. The magnitude of differences. The measurement of discriminative sensibility: Weber's law. Fechner's interpretation of this as the psycho-physic law. Criticism thereof.
Association
The problem of the connection of our thoughts. It depends on mechanical conditions. 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 between the three kinds of association. Association in voluntary thought. Similarity no elementary law. History of the doctrine of association.
The Perception of Time, 605
The sensible present. Its duration is the primitive time-perception. Accuracy of our estimate of short durations. We have no sense for empty time. Variations of our time-estimate. The feeling of past time is a present feeling. Its cerebral process.
Memory
Primary memory. Analysis of the phenomenon of memory. Retention and reproduction are both caused by paths of association in the brain. The conditions of goodness in memory. Native retentiveness is unchangeable. All improvement of memory consists in better thinking. Other conditions of good memory. Recognition, or the sense of familiarity. Exact measurements of memory. Forgetting. Pathological cases. Professor Ladd criticised.
INDEX.
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 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.
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