The Principles of Psychology

By James, William

Book Id: WPLBN0000622427
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 1.56 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	The Principles of Psychology
Author:	James, William
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature, Literature & thought, Writing.
Collections:	Blackmask Online Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Blackmask Online


Citation APA MLA Chicago James, W. (n.d.). The Principles of Psychology. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.cc/

Description
Excerpt: Chapter 1. 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 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.

Table of Contents
Table of Contents: The Principles of Psychology, 1 -- William James, 1