The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)

Let us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation, and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form, advancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans call it, t...

It is matter of popular observation that some men have sharper senses than others, and that some have acuter minds and are able to 'split hairs' and see two shades of meaning wh...

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 the contrary, I do violence to the fo...

Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual presence of selective attention has received hardly any notice from psychologists of the English empiricist school. The Germans...

on our after-memory of it. Only then is it combined in a system and knowingly made to contribute to a result. Only then does it _count_ for us. So that _the_ EFFECTIVE _consciou...

In the next two chapters I shall deal with what is sometimes called internal perception, or the perception of _time_, and of events as occupying a date therein, especially when...

We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from th...

The reader who found himself swamped with too much metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse time of it in this one, which is exclusively metaphysical. Metaphysics...

its new set of associates, instead of fading out itself, it continues persistently active along with them, forming an identical part in the two ideas, and making these, _pro tan...

To show that the question of reality being extra-mental or not is not likely to arise in the absence of repeated experiences of the _same_, take the example of an altogether unp...

In Chapter VIII, p. 221, the distinction was drawn between two kinds of knowledge of things, bare acquaintance with them and knowledge about them. The possibility of two such kn...

When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of da...

After discrimination, association! Already in the last chapter I have had to invoke, in order to explain the improvement of certain discriminations by practice, the 'association...

Minds, as we know them, are temporary existences. Whether my mind had a being prior to the birth of my body, whether it shall have one after the latter's decease, are questions...

The elementary properties of nerve-tissue on which the brain-functions depend are far from being satisfactorily made out. The scheme that suggests itself in the first instance t...

In describing the functions of the hemispheres a short way back, we used language derived from both the bodily and the mental life, saying now that the animal made indeterminate...

We have now finished the physiological preliminaries of our subject and must in the remaining chapters study the mental states themselves whose cerebral conditions and concomita...

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, deci...

The mental states usually distinguished as feelings are the _emotions_, and the _sensations_ we get from skin, muscle, viscus, eye, ear, nose, and palate. The 'thoughts,' as rec...

In the last chapter what concerned us was the direct _intuition_ of time. We found it limited to intervals of considerably less than a minute. Beyond its borders extends the imm...

[123] The nature of the movement also seems to make it vary. Mr. B. I. Gilman and I reacted to the same signal by simply raising our hand, and again by carrying our hand towards...

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 o...

Locke on discrimination. Martineau _ditto_. Simultaneous sensations originally fuse into one object. The principle of mediate comparison. Not all differences are differences of...

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 atte...

Consciousness tends to the personal form. It is in constant change. It is sensibly continuous. 'Substantive' and 'transitive' parts of Consciousness. Feelings of relation. Feeli...

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 o...

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...

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. Nati...

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...

Time relations: lapses of Consciousness--Locke _v_. Descartes. The 'unconsciousness' of hysterics not genuine. Minds may split into dissociated parts. Space-relations: the Seat...

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-estimat...