Psychology: Briefer Course

=Voluntary Acts.=--Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone knows, and which no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things...

=The Me and the I.=--Whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of _myself_, of my _personal existence_. At the same time it is _I_ who am aw...

=The Order of our Ideas.=--After discrimination, association! It is obvious that all advance in knowledge must consist of both operations; for in the course of our education, ob...

=The order of our study must be analytic.= We are now prepared to begin the introspective study of the adult consciousness itself. Most books adopt the so-called synthetic metho...

=Its Definition.=--_Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education...

=General Idea of Nervous Function.=--If I begin chopping the foot of a tree, its branches are unmoved by my act, and its leaves murmur as peacefully as ever in the wind. If, on...

=Perception and Sensation compared.=--A pure sensation we saw above, p. 12, to be an abstraction never realized in adult life. Anything which affects our sense-organs does also...

=The Narrowness of Consciousness.=--One of the most extraordinary facts of our life is that, although we are besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole sensory surfa...

=What Reasoning is.=--We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating the brutes as wholly irr...

=Emotions compared with Instincts.=--An emotion is a tendency to feel, and an instinct is a tendency to act, characteristically, when in presence of a certain object in the envi...

=Incoming nerve-currents are the only agents which normally affect the brain.= The human nerve-centres are surrounded by many dense wrappings of which the effect is to protect t...

=Its Importance for Psychology.=--There remains a condition of general neural activity so important as to deserve a chapter by itself--I refer to the aptitude of the nerve-centr...

As adult thinkers we have a definite and apparently instantaneous knowledge of the sizes, shapes, and distances of the things amongst which we live and move; and we have moreove...

=Analysis of the Phenomenon of Memory.=--Memory proper, or secondary memory as it might be styled, is the knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped f...

=The Eye's Structure= is described in all the books on anatomy. I will only mention the few points which concern the psychologist.[10] It is a flattish sphere formed by a tough

=The Nervous Discharge.=--The word discharge is constantly used, and must be used in this book, to designate the escape of a current downwards into muscles or other internal org...

=The Ear.=--"The auditory organ in man consists of three portions, known respectively as the _external ear_, the _middle ear_ or _tympanum_, and the _internal ear_ or _labyrinth...

=What it is.=--_Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organism, so that copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward stimulus is gone._ No mental...

=Embryological Sketch.=--The brain is a sort of _pons asinorum_ in anatomy until one gets a certain general conception of it as a clue. Then it becomes a comparatively simple af...

=Discrimination versus Association.=--On p. 15 I spoke of the baby's first object being the germ out of which his whole later universe develops by the addition of new parts from...

=Nerve-endings in the Skin.=--"Many of the afferent skin-nerves end in connection with hair-bulbs; the fine hairs over most of the cutaneous surface, projecting from the skin, t...

=1) The Sensation of Motion over Surfaces.=--This has generally been assumed by physiologists to be impossible until the positions of _terminus a quo_ and _terminus ad quem_ are...

=The definition of Psychology= may be best given in the words of Professor Ladd, as the _description and explanation of states of consciousness as such_. By states of consciousn...

=The sensible present has duration.= Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the _present_ moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences oc...

=Different states of mind can mean the same.= The function by which we mark off, discriminate, draw a line round, and identify a numerically distinct subject of discourse is cal...

=All consciousness is motor.= The reader will not have forgotten, in the jungle of purely inward processes and products through which the last chapters have borne him, that the...

Voluntary acts, 415. They are secondary performances, 415. No third kind of idea is called for, 418. The motor-cue, 420. Ideo-motor action, 432. Action after deliberation, 428....

The Me and the I, 176. The material Me, 177. The social Me, 179. The spiritual Me, 181. Self-appreciation, 182. Self-seeking, bodily, social, and spiritual, 184. Rivalry of the...

Analytic order of our study, 151. Every state of mind forms part of a personal consciousness, 152. The same state of mind is never had twice, 154. Permanently recurring ideas ar...

The attribute of extensity belongs to all objects of sensation, 335. The construction of real space, 337. The processes which it involves: 1) Subdivision, 338; 2) Coalescence of...

The order of our ideas, 253. It is determined by cerebral laws, 255. The ultimate cause of association is habit, 256. The elementary law in association, 257. Indeterminateness o...

The narrowness of the field of consciousness, 217. Dispersed attention, 218. To how much can we attend at once? 219. The varieties of attention, 220. Voluntary attention, its mo...

Emotions compared with instincts, 373. The varieties of emotion are innumerable, 374. The cause of their varieties, 375. The feeling, in the coarser emotions, results from the b...

General idea of nervous function, 91. The frog's nerve-centres, 92. The pigeon's nerve-centres, 96. What the hemispheres do, 97. The automaton-theory, 101. The localization of f...

Perception and sensation compared, 312. The perceptive state of mind is not a compound, 313. Perception is of definite things, 316. Illusions, 317. First type: inference of the...

What it is, 287. It involves both retention and recall, 289. Both elements explained by paths formed by habit in the brain, 290. Two conditions of a good memory, persistence and...

Incoming nerve-currents, 9. Terminal organs, 10. 'Specific energies,' 11. Sensations cognize qualities, 13. Knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about, 14. Objects of sensati...

What it is, 351. It involves the use of abstract characters, 353. What is meant by an 'essential' character, 354. The 'essence' varies with the subjective interest, 358. The two...

Discrimination and association; definition of discrimination, 244. Conditions which favor it, 245. The sensation of difference, 246. Differences inferred, 248. The analysis of c...

The sensible present has duration, 280. We have no sense for absolutely empty time, 281. We measure duration by the events which succeed in it, 283. The feeling of past time is...

What it is, 302. Imaginations differ from man to man; Galton's statistics of visual imagery, 303. Images of sounds, 306. Images of movement, 307. Images of touch, 308. Loss of i...

Its importance, and its physical basis, 134. Due to pathways formed in the centres, 136. Its practical uses, 138. Concatenated acts, 140. Necessity for guiding sensations in sec...

The ear, 47. The qualities of sound, 43. Pitch, 44. 'Timbre,' 45. Analysis of compound air-waves, 56. No fusion of elementary sensations of sound, 57. Harmony and discord, 58. D...

Different states of mind can mean the same, 239. Conceptions of abstract, of universal, and of problematic objects, 240. The thought of 'the same' is not the same thought over a...

Its definition, 391. Every instinct is an impulse, 392. Instincts are not always blind or invariable, 395. Two principles of non-uniformity, 398. Enumeration of instincts in man...