The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)

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 which at the moment...

_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 in the performance....

little more closely just what happens in this instance of it. The content of the joint-feeling, to begin with, is an object, and _is_ in itself a place. For it to be _placed_, s...

A pure sensation we saw above, p. 7, to be an abstraction never realized in adult life. Any quality of a thing which affects our sense-organs does also more than that: it arouse...

_In the sensations of hearing, touch, sight, and pain we are accustomed to distinguish from among the other elements the element of voluminousness._ We call the reverberations o...

_might_ be a world in which all things differed, and in which what properties there were were ultimate and had no farther predicates. In such a world there would be as many kind...

After inner perception, outer perception! The next three chapters will treat of the processes by which we cognize at all times the present world of space and the material things...

In speaking of the instincts it has been impossible to keep them separate from the emotional excitements which go with them. Objects of rage, love, fear, etc., not only prompt a...

Everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its truth. In the case of acquiescence...

"No idea of extension can arise from a _simultaneous_ excitation" of a multitude of nerve-terminations like those of the skin or the retina, since this would imply a "knowledge...

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 irrational creatures. Nev...

_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 copy, however,...

In this final chapter I shall treat of what has sometimes been called _psychogenesis_, and try to ascertain just how far the connections of things in the outward environment can...

due to a series of secondarily organized reflex arcs (Vol. I. p. 116). The first contraction is the one distinctly willed, and after willing it we let the rest of the chain ratt...

The 'hypnotic,' 'mesmeric,' or 'magnetic' trance _can be induced in various ways_, each operator having his pet method. The simplest one is to leave the subject seated by himsel...

[326] To be sagacious is to be a good observer. J. S. Mill has a passage which is so much in the spirit of the text that I cannot forbear to quote it. "The observer is not he wh...

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 final result of them all must...

chaps. vii, viii. W. Wundt, Beiträge, pp. 422 ff.; Vorlesungen, iv, xiii. H. Helmholtz, Physiol. Optik, pp. 430, 447. A. Binet, Psychol. du Raisonnement, chaps. iii, v. Wundt an...

Psychologie, chap xxi. Appendix. Ollé Laprune: La Certitude Morale (1881). G. F. Stout: On Genesis of Cognition of Physical Reality, in 'Mind,' Jan. 1890. J. Pikler: The Psychol...

it is the prime necessity of musical psychology to distinguish--the effect chiefly sensuous of mere streams or masses of finely colored sound, and the distinctive musical emotio...

[46] The intermediary and shortened locations of the lost hand and foot in the amputation cases also show this. It is easy to see why the phantom foot might continue to follow t...

Programme of the chapter. Elementary feelings are innate. The question refers to their combinations. What is meant by 'experience'. Spencer on ancestral experience. Two ways in...

Voluntary movements: they presuppose a memory of involuntary movements. Kinæsthetic impressions, 488. No need to assume feelings of innervation. The 'mental cue' for a movement...

The feeling of crude extensity. The perception of spatial order. Space-'relations'. The meaning of localization. 'Local signs'. The construction of 'real' space. The subdivision...

Instinctive reaction and emotional expression shade imperceptibly into each other. The expression of grief; of fear; of hatred. Emotion is a consequence, not the cause, of the b...

'Recepts'. In reasoning, we pick out essential qualities. What is meant by a mode of conceiving. What is involved in the existence of general propositions. The two factors of re...

Its definition. Instincts not always blind or invariable. Two principles of non-uniformity in instincts: 1) Their inhibition by habits; 2) Their transitoriness. Man has more ins...

Belief and its opposites. The various orders of reality. 'Practical' realities. The sense of our own bodily existence is the nucleus of all reality. The paramount reality of sen...

Perception and sensation. Perception is of definite and probable things. Illusions;--of the first type;--of the second type. The neural process in perception. 'Apperception'. Is...

Its distinction from perception. Its cognitive function--acquaintance with qualities. No pure sensations after the first days of life. The 'relativity of knowledge'. The law of...

Our images are usually vague. Vague images not necessarily general notions. Individuals differ in imagination; Gabon's researches. The 'visile' type, 58. The 'audile' type. The...