Psychology: The Briefer Course (Notre Dame Series in Great Books) [Abridged] 9780268015572, 0268015570, 9780268083564

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THE BRIEFER COURSE edited by Gordon Allport “This book . . . was originally published in 1892 by Holt and republished by Harper in 1961. A durable classic in the field, it is developed on the structure of seventeen definitive chapters treating cryptic themes such as Habit, Stream of Consciousness, The Self, Attention, Conception, Discrimination, Association, Memory, Imagination, Perception, Reasoning, Emotion, Instinct, Will, and the like. . . . Today . . . it is still eminently readable scholarship.” —Journal of Psychology and Christianity

William James

PSYCHOLOGY

edited by Gordon Allport

William James

“The re-publication of Jamesʼs work . . . is a testimony to his monumental importance in the field of psychology. The work, a brief of his larger work, The Principles of Psychology, illustrates to the modern mind how far we have come in returning to some of Jamesʼs insights.” —Studies in Formative Spirituality

William James (1842–1910) was an American psychologist and philosopher and one of the most popular thinkers of the nineteenth century. He is the author of many works, including his monumental The Principles of Psychology (1890), Human Immortality (1898), and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902). Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967) was one of the first psychologists to study personality, and also researched human attitudes, prejudices, and religious beliefs. He is the author of Personality (1937), The Individual and His Religion (1950), and The Nature of Prejudice (1954). University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46656 undpress.nd.edu Cover design: Margaret Gloster

PSYCHOLOGY THE BRIEFER COURSE

“William James is a towering figure in the history of American thought— without doubt the foremost psychologist this country has produced. His depiction of mental life is faithful, vital, and subtle. In verve, he has no equal. . . . “There is a sharp contrast between the expanding horizon of James and the constricting horizon of much contemporary psychology. The one opens doors to discovery, the other closes them. Much psychology today is written in terms of reaction, little in terms of becoming. James would say that a balance is needed, but that only by assuming that man has the capacity for growth are we likely to discover the scope of this same capacity.” —from the introduction by Gordon W. Allport

William James PSYCHOLOGY THE BRIEFER COURSE edited by Gordon Allport

PSYCHOLOGY THE

BRIEFER

COURSE

NOTRE DAME SERIES

John Henry Newman, St. Thomas Aquinas,

IN THE GREAT BOOKS

The Idea of a University (1982) Treatise on Happiness (1983)

William James PSYCHOLOGY THE

BR IEFER

COUR SE

edited by Gordon Allport

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS NOTRE DAME , INDIANA

First Harper Torchbook edition published 1961 Introduction copyright © 1961 by Gordon Allport

This book was originally published by Henry Holt and Company in 1892. University of Notre Dame Press edition, 1985 Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu

Reprinted in 1988, 1991, 1994, 1996, 2003, 2009, 2012 Manufactured in the United States of America All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data James, William, 1842–1910. Psychology : the briefer course.

Reprint. Originally published : 1st Harper torchbook ed. New York : Harper, 1961. (Harper torchbooks. The Academic library) ISBN 13: 978-0-268-01557-2 (pbk.) ISBN 10: 0-268-01557-0 (pbk.) ISBN 13: 978-0-268-08356-4 (web pdf) 1. Psychology.

I. Allport, Gordon W. (Gordon Willard), 1897–1967. II. Title. BF121.J2 1985 150 84 - 40821

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS PREFATORY NOTE

xi

INTRODUCTION BY GORDON ALLPORT

xiii

INTRODUCTORY (ORIGINAL CHAPTER 1)

xxv

CHAPTER

HABIT Its importance, and its physical basis, I. formed in the centres, 3. acts, 7

Due to pathways

Its practical uses, 5.

Concatenated

Necessity for guiding sensations in secondarily auto­

matic performances, 8.

Pedagogical maxims concerning the

formation of habits, 9. CHAPTER 2 18

THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Analytic order of our study, 18.

Every state of mind forms

part of a personal consciousness, 19. is never had twice, 2 1. fiction, 23.

The same state of mind

Permanently recurring ideas are a

Every personal consciousness is continuous, 24.

Substantive and transitive states, 27. with a ' fringe ' of relations, 30. 34.

Every object appears

The ' topic ' of the thought,

Thought may be rational in any sort of imagery, 35.

Consciousness is always especially interested in some one part of its object, 37. CHAPTER 3

THE SELF

43

The Me and the I, 43. Me, 46.

The material Me, 44.

The spiritual Me, 46.

The social

Self-appreciation, 47.

Self­

seeking, bodily, social and spiritual, 5 1.

Rivalry of the Mes,

53.

of

Their

hierarchy,

57.

The I, or ' pure ego,' 62. ' fused' sensations, 63. 67.

Teleology

self-interest,

6o.

Thoughts are not compounded of

The ' soul' as a combining medium,

The sense of personal identity, 68.

Explained by iden­

tity of function in successive passing thoughts, 70. v

Mutations

CONTENTS

vi of the self, 72. alities,

77.

Insane delusions, 74.

Mediumships

or

Alternating person­

possessions,

79.

Who

is the

Thinker, 82. CHAPTER 4

ATTENTION The

narrowness of

persed attention, 85. 86.

the

field of

consciousness, 84.

The varieties of attention, 87.

momentary character, 91. must

change,

93.

Dis­

To how much can we attend at once? Voluntary attention, its

To keep our attention, an object

Genius

and

The

94.

Attention's

conditions,

adapted, 96

The idea of the object must be aroused, 99.

Pedagogic remarks, l03.

95.

attention,

physiological

sense-organ

must

be

Attention and free-will, 104. CHAPTER 5

CONCEPTION

106

Different states of mind can mean the same, 106.

Concep­

tions of abstract, of universal, and of problematic objects, 107. The thought of ' the same ' is not the same thought over again,

llO.

CHAPTER 6

DISCRIMINATION

I II

Discrimination and association; definition of discrimination, 1 ll.

Conditions which favor it,

ence,

l 13.

l r 2.

The sensation of differ­

Differences inferred, II5.

pound objects. II5.

already be separately known, concomitants, II8.

The analysis of com­

To be easily singled out, a quality should r l 7.

Dissociation by varying

Practice improves discrimination, I I9. CHAPTER 7

I20

ASSOCIATION The order of our ideas, 120. laws, 122.

It is determined by cerebral

The ultimate cause of association is habit, 123.

The elementary law in association, 124.

Indeterminateness of

its results, 125.

Total recall, 126.

Partial recall, and the law

of interest, 128.

Frequency, recency, vividness, and emotional

congruity tend to determine the object recalled, 131. recall, or ' association by similarity,' 134. thought, 138.

Focalized

Voluntary trains of

The solution of problems, 140.

elementary law; summary and conclusion, 144·

Similarity no

vii

CONTENTS CHAPTER 8

THE SENSE OF TIME

147

The sensible present has duration, 147.

We have no sense

for absolutely empty time, 148.

We measure duration by the

events which succeed in it, 150.

The feeling of past time is a

present feeling, 152.

Due to a constant cerebral condition, 153. CHAPTER 9

MEMORY

154

What it is, 154.

It involves both retention and recall, 156.

Both elements explained by paths formed by habit in the brain, 157.

Two conditions of a good memory, persistence and nu­

merousness of paths, 159.

Cramming, 162.

tentiveness is unchangeable, 163. ory,

165.

Recognition,

conditions,

166.

One's native re­

Improvement of the mem­

Forgetting,

167.

Pathological

l 68.

CHAPTER 10

IMAGINATION

169

What it is, 169.

Imaginations differ from man to man; Gal­

lon's statistics of visual imagery, 170. Images of movement, 174· images in aphasia, 176.

Images of sounds, 173·

Images of touch, 175·

Loss of

The neural process in imagination, 177. CHAPTER 11

I79

PERCEPTION Perception and sensation compared, state of mind is not a compound, i8o. things, 183.

Illusions, 184.

usual object, 185.

The perceptive

Perception is of definite

First type: inference of the more

Second type: inference of the object of

which our mind is full, 188. and old-fogyism, 194. tion, 196.

l 79.

' Apperception,' 193·

Genius

The physiological process in percep­

Hallucinations, 197· CHAPTER 12

THE PERCEPTION O F SPACE

202

The attribute of extensity belongs to all objects of sensation, 202.

The construction of real

space, 204.

The processes

which it involves: 1) Subdivision, 205; 2) Coalescence of differ­ ent sensible data into one ' thing,' 206; 3) Location in an en­ vironment, 207; 4) Place in a series of positions, 208; 5) Meas-

CONTENTS

viii urement, 209.

Objects which are signs, and objects which are

realities, 2 I 2.

The 'third dimension' ,

distance, 213.

The part played by the intellect in space-per-

Berkeley's theory of

ception, 216. CHAPTER 1 3 2l8

REASONING What it is, 218. 220.

It involves the use of abstract characters,

What is meant by an 'essential' character,

'essence' varies with the subjective interest, great points in reasoning,

225.

221.

The

The two

'sagacity' and 'wisdom' , 227.

Sa­

gacity, 229. The help given by association by similarity, The reasoning powers of brutes, 234.

23i.

CHAPTER 14 CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOVEMENT

237

All consciousness is motor, 237.

Three classes of movement

to which it leads, 239. CHAPTER 15 EMOTION Emotions compared with instincts, emotion are innumerable, 242.

The feeling,

24i.

240.

The varieties of

The cause of their varieties,

in the coarser emotions,

results from the

bodily expression, 242. This view must not be called material­ istic, 247. This view explains the great variability of emotion, 248.

A corollary verified, 249.

The subtler emotions,

An objection replied to, 250. Gene­

Description of fear, 252. sis of the emotional reactions, 253. 25i.

CHAPTER 16 INSTINCT Its definition, 258. Every instinct is an impulse, 259. In­ stincts are not always blind or invariable, 262. Two principles of non-uniformity, 265.

Enumeration of instincts in man, 273.

Description of fear, 274. CHAPTER 17 WILL Voluntary acts, 282. They are secondary performances, 282. No third kind of idea is called for, 285. The motor-cue, 287.

258

CONTENTS ldeo-motor action,

289.

ix

Action after deliberation,

types

of

decision,

Healthiness of will,

302.

296.

295.

Five

3or. 303. The explosive will: (1) from defective inhibition, 304; (2) from exaggerated impulsion, 306. The obstructed will, 308. Effort feels like an original force, 309. Pleasure and pain as springs of action, 3r r. What holds attention determines ac­ tion, 315. Will is a relation between the mind and its 'ideas,' 316. Volitional effort is effort of attention, 317. The question of free-will, 322. Ethical importance of the phenomenon of effort, 325.

chief

The

feeling

of

effort,

Unhealthiness of will,

EPILOGUE PSYCHOLOGY

AND

PHILOSOPHY

What the word metaphysics means, sciousness to the brain, their 'objects,'

333. facts,

33r.

329.

328 Relation of con­

The relation of states of mind to

The changing character of consciousness,

States of consciousness

334.

328.

themselves are not verifiable

PREFATORY NOTE This publication of Psychology: The Briefer Course is an ef­ fort to keep this seminal

book available to a wide range of teachers

and students who have found it significant. The Briefer Course, which is the third volume published in the Notre Dame Series in the Great Books, has regularly found a place on the core seminar lists of Notre Dame's Program of Liberal Studies and of St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe). We in the Program are grateful to Harper and Row for assis­

1961 1985 edition restores the Introductory Chapter,

tance and encouragement in reprinting and correcting their edition. This

which along with the epilogue and Gordon Allport's fine introduc­ tion explicitly invite reflection on psychology's place in the circle of knowledge and specifically on the relationship between psy­ chology and philosophy.

The Briefer Course is a classic in the history of psychology, a book whose common sense overview and inner tensions show the basis for and possibility of the divergent schools that came to fracture the discipline throughout this century. At the same time the latest scholarship on William James supports the view that The Briefer Course is more than a redaction of the preceding two-volume work of James, The Principles of Psychology. It represents on occasion a true revision of his thought as expressed in The Principles. Special gratitude is due the Class of

1956 in Notre Dame's

Program of Liberal Studies for their founding support for this series. I also am grateful to Clark Power of the Program and Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard University for their counsel in bringing this edition forth. Walter Nicgorski June, Xl

1985

INTRODUCTION

BY GORDON W. ALLPORT

William James is a towering figure in the history of American thought-without doubt the foremost psychologist this country has produced. His depiction of mental life is faithful, vital, subtle. In verve he has no equal. Yet James is not as well known to modern readers as he deserves. One reason is that he wrote at the end of the Victorian era, just before Freud and American behaviorism made their shattering onslaught on contemporary thought. . Both of these movements proceeded from assumptions, and dealt with topics, alien to James. Whereas he wrote in the era of intellectualism, psychoanalysis and behaviorism were soon to blow the bugles for a new age of irrationalism and mechanism. Their surging popularity soon made James seem old-fashioned, perhaps even a bit pious. But now that we have recovered from the irreverent shocks administered by Freud, Pavlov, Watson, we begin to perceive that the psychological insights of James have the steadiness of a polar star. The present-day student is a wiser scientist and practitioner if he is acquainted with this beacon. I welcome the opportunity to introduce a famous textbook to the modern reader by calling attention to certain features of permanent value and to certain instructive differences that mark it off from psychological writing of today. James published the two volume Principles of Psychology in 1890. Then two years later, in order to make the work more available for classroom use, he condensed, reworked, rewrote the two volumes into Psychology: Briefer Course. Xlll

xiv

INTRODUCTION

Students soon came to speak of the longer work as "James," and of the Briefer Course as'' Jimmy." The present edition further abridges the text by omitting the opening chapters dealing with sensory processes.

What

James had to say about vision, hearing, touch soon became out of date, and even in 1892 he was not satisfied with this portion of the Briefer Course.

And yet what he says about

the higher mental processes

(the present content of the

book) is forever fresh and challenging.

Contemporary stu­

dents of psychology cannot afford to overlook the wisdom of James's treatment of the subtler regions of the human psyche. When compared with the depth of James, current fashion in " cognitive theory

" seems thin.

What is truly new is never

wholly true. Let us first examine the content of the present text before turning to the broader significance of James for present-day psychology. In most current textbooks the longest single chapter is de­ voted to learning.

At first sight James seems to omit this

topic altogether, but this is not the case.

The chapter on

Association deals with the problem after the classic manner, and the volume opens with the famous,much-quoted chapter on Habit.

After a few pages of physiological theory this

chapter launches forth into an eloquent plea for forming good habits, for moral athleticism. nature;

Habits are not merely second

they are "ten times nature."

"Never suffer an

exception to occur," says James, if you would break a bad habit.

Seize every opportunity to express the impulses as­

sociated with good habits.

It is by fashioning habits that

we fashion our will and our character.

No one who reads

this vivid exhortation is likely to forget its impact. Habit, for James,is the structural unit of mental life.

It

is a physical fact like the creases or folds in a garment.

It

has survival value, for it " simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue."

This statement il­

lustrates James's functionalism: mental processes are what

INTRODUCTION

xv

they are because they are useful to life. James wrote under the shadow of Darwin. What does modern psychology say about habit? Later writers, such as Dewey and Hull, also made habit the key­ stones of their systems, though Dewey's view is broader and Hull's narrower than James's. But it is doubtful that any current psychologist would regard sheer frequency (repeti­ tion) as an exclusive principle of habit formation as James seems to do. If frequency were the only law of learning no child would ever stop sucking his thumb. I choose this issue to illustrate a dominant trait of James's writing. He is so filled with enthusiasm for the idea he is momentarily expounding that he forgets to make appropriate qualifications. In one context he states his position so vividly that both he and the reader are swept along, only to dis­ cover in another context that contradictions. occur. Thus, having convinced us in the chapter on Habit that every single act is important, that we should " never suffer an exception to occur," he gives us in the following chapter the opposite counsel. In an ethical dilemma, he writes, the problem with a man " is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose to become." In other words, the ball-and-chain conception of habit gives way in favor of the potency of a guiding self-image. To keep a selected ideal uppermost in mind is of greater importance than the per­ formance of a specific act. Contradictions and paradoxes lie in the texture of his thinking beGause to James truth is pluralistic. What holds in one context need not hold in another. He wrote to a friend that he knew the Briefer Course was " unsystematic and loose." But, he said, he preferred it so, since" a terrible flavor of humbug " marks the work of any psychologist who claims perfect consistency and exactitude for all his state­ ments. Mental life is too varied and overflowing to be pushed into pint-sized pigeonholes. James would agree with Emerson that a. foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

xvi

INTRODUCTION

Some chapters have a classic quality; others are merely routine. Unsurpassed for incisive, original, enduring insight are the chapters on The Stream of Consciousness, The Self, and Emotion. The first of these is the most typically Jamesian. It describes the subtle flights and perchings of our thought and challenges psychologists to discover and explain their order. His analysis of the nature of the self in psychology has remained standard ever since it was writ­ ten. The self is a haunting problem and no one has handled it more perceptively than James. Emotion sets forth a fasci­ nating proposed theory (now known as the James-Lange theory) which has been the subject of lively controversy for seven decades. One is tempted to say that the most dated chapters are those on Perception and on Instinct, although in both there are exciting anticipations of later discoveries. James clearly saw the effect that emotion and interest have on perception, thus foreshadowing current " directed state " theories. As for instincts in animals the following statement anticipates by half a century the discovery of " imprinting " by mod­ ern ethologists: When objects of a certain class elicit from an animal a certain sort of reaction, it often happens that the animal becomes partial to the first specimen of the class on which it has reacted, and will not afterward react to any other specimen. A chick will follow a human hand as readily as its mother if the hand makes the initial imprint upon the instinct. Take the chapter on Reasoning. The very term" reason­ ing," though it points to the crowning capacity of the human mind, is nowadays seldom used. In its place we speak of " cognitive theory " which today is largely cast in terms of a machine model. Men no longer " reason," they behave like giant computers: they receive inputs and produce outputs, and in spite of noise and redundancy, they somehow manage to code-and so it goes. James, on the other hand, tells u s

INTRODUCTION

xvii

that reasoning is the " ability to deal with novel data " (which a machine does poorly if at all). He shows us how we select and recombine attributes of experience, always fol­ lowing a course " important for our interests." Since ma­ chines lack interests it seems that James's simple scaffolding may outlast the currently fashionable computer model. James draws his design from fresh daily experience, whereas today the tendency is to tailor human capacities to fit the alleged properties of the machine. Contemporary model builders will do well to return to James to see whether in fact their mechaI1ical formulations do justice to the subtleties of process he depicts. The chapter on Association pre-dates the conditioned re­ flex, modern stimulus-response doctrine, and the vogue of reinforcement theory. But all these principles are fore­ shadowed in this standard chapter. James is hospitable to all the factors determining association, whereas the tendency among twentieth century psychologists is to select one for emphasis, denying the efficacy of others. While James be­ lieves that the laws of association are in part reflections of the laws of cerebral physiology, he insists that the " effects of interested attention and volition remain." These im­ portant factors of interest and will, James suggests, may not have precise cerebral correlates. We note that over and over again James introduces the concept of interest, but fails to develop it fully. In percep­ tion, association, and reasoning, he says, interest plays a directive role. Why then does he fail to develop a theory of interest? We recall that he wrote at the end of the intel­ lectualistic era in psychology, prior to the day of Shand, McDougall, Freud, and other writers who shifted the central ground of psychology from intellectual to motivational processes. James had no developed theory of motivation. True, he skirts the subject in his chapters on Instinct and Will. But instincts, though numerous, are transitory and in their pure form are of little importance in the human species. Will includes forms of temperament, and also the

xviii

INTRODUCTION

output of effort which looms large in his thinking about the human mind, and, as we shall see, plunges him into the baffling riddle of freedom of the will.

But nowhere does

he offer a theory of the acquired structural units of motiva­ tion which his recurrent use of the concept of interest seems to require. We may blame the Zeitgeist for his failure to see psychol­ ogy's need for a fuller analysis of motivation.

He lived at

the edge of the new era, but did not enter it.

Repeatedly

he points to the pressure of irrational motives on intellectual life, but fails to follow through.

The following passage in­

dicates his groping: Pure ' reason ' is only one out of a thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us.

Who can count all the silly

fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day?

Who can

swear that his prejudices and irrational opinions constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified beliefs? Just as James failed to embrace fully the problem of motivation, he failed to catch a vision of the psychology of

personality which in later years was to become a central concern of the science.

Here too James seems to be teeter­

ing on the brink of the new era.

His only use of the term

" personality " is in connection with the pathology of alter­ nating selves.

Charcot and Janet had made him aware of the

occasional hysteric cases where two or more structures of mental life can coexist.

Four years before the Briefer Course

was published Robert Louis Stevenson had dramatized the situation in his tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. James failed to see that if dual personalities (which are rare) can be objectively studied, so too can single, well integrated personalities (which are common).

James speaks

freely of the" self "-a phenomenological concept-but does not objectify the concept so that the structure, coherence and conflicts of the total human organism can be fixed for

xix

INTRODUCTION

study. It needed the laboratory of behaviorism and the clinic of Freud to establish personality as an outer focus for research and theory. We regret that James did not enter this new field, for he had the correct orientation. He tells us that the normal self is a " loosely construed thing," but that " on the whole " it has an identity. James was not an atomist nor a reduction­ ist. He wanted above all else to depict the functional unities

of mental life. Personal totality fascinated him. In the Varieties of Religious Experience

( 1902 )

he showed himself

a genius in handling the complex sentiments of concrete personalities. We have reason therefore to regret that he antedated the era of personality. The close reader will mark his deep concern with the problem of the freedom of the will. Several chapters of the present volume contain skirmishes with this always baffling topic. His own preoccupation had deep intrapsychic roots. At about the age of twenty-seven he entered a prolonged period of depression and melancholy. His letters and diary of the period give indications of the agony of unreality and anxiety in which he lived. He felt himself no different from the epileptic idiot he had chanced to see in a mental hospital. It is a striking fact that he dates his recovery from the mo­ ment he decided to subscribe to the doctrine of freedom. In his definitive biography, The Thought and Character of

William James, Ralph Barton Perry reprints a revealing passage from the diary written in April, 1870: I think yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will-" the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts "-need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume ...that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. James did not hold this solution lightly. The issue vexed him all his life long, for he saw clearly the counter argument

INTRODUCTION

xx

-that since natural science finds every event in the physical universe to be casually determined,then-if it be a science-­ psychology should assume that every thought and act are similarly determined. And yet James knew that even the psychologist while denying freedom, half believes in it,and almost always acts as if it were true. Otherwise there would be no place for praise or blame in life,and no ground for human morals.

To resolve the issue James makes a tentative

case for at least a limited form of freedom, " the power to keep the selected idea uppermost."

While James desires

with all his heart to be a scientist he refuses to accept pre­ suppositions that run counter to the totality of human ex­ perience. We have referred to some of the contradictions and para­ doxes that lie in James's system. He accepts both determin­ ism and free will, admitting that they are incompatible doctrines.

He approves the objective approach to mental

life, but leans constantly on the riches of introspection. He makes a good case for regarding man as an automaton but turns around and says this view is an "unwarrantable im­ pertinence in the present state of psychology." conscious

The "un­

" to him is at one time nothing mental at all but

merely latent traces in the brain;

at another it is the

subliminal outreach that connects the human mind with transcendental truths. Furthermore we find James expound­ ing alternative solutions to the body-mind problem. Carried away by his own persuasiveness he adopts these solutions seriatim, unabashed by his own inconsistency. By turns he is

parallelistic,

epiphenomenalistic, and

interactionistic.

William McDougall,attempting to gain support for his own interactionist position,found what he was looking for in James but also found flat contradictions.

"Could anything,"

asked the aggrieved McDougall, "be more perverse!" The chief mark, therefore, of James's system-if it be a system-is its magnificent tentativeness. The problems he tackles have an ultimate sweep.

Lesser authors sidestep

INTRODUCTION

xxi

them. James knew that his answers could be only tentative. He justified his tentativeness by evolving a bold, wholly American, philosophy of pragmatism. Answers to basic riddles, he argued, can be validated only by their fruitful­ ness. Do they bear lively consequences for thought and action? Since the slices and cleavages we impose upon life are arbitrary we must not expect an answer valid under one set of circumstances to be necessarily valid under another. Hence James was not afraid of contradiction. The only way to erect a self-consistent theory is for one to blind oneself to the magnificent variety of mental life. Yet James found his own enforced tentativeness a strain. When he finished the twelve-year task of writing the Prin­ ciples he was bone-tired and weary. In sending the manu­ script to his publisher he allowed himself to explode, calling it a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts. 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2d, that W. ]. is an incapable. Under the circumstances it is a wonder that he could muster the energy to produce the Briefer Course close on the heels of the Principles. In it, too, his skepticism crops out. At the conclusion of the present volume he declares that psy­ chology has not produced a" single law in the sense in which physics shows us laws.. . . This is no science, it is only the hope of a science." Whether psychology in the latter half of the twentieth century is yet a science or still only an ante­ science the reader is asked to judge for himself. More clearly than most psychologists James saw that the explora­ tion of human experience is dogged by metaphysical assump­ tions. What sort of psychology you have will depend for one thing on your assumptions regarding the relation be­ tween states of consciousness and the brain. Is man a free agent, is he a giant computer, is he but a child grown strong, or is he like unto the albino rat? Whatever assumptions

XXll

INTRODUCTION

you make you will find that "the waters of metaphysical criticism leak at every joint." Few modern psychologists state the issue with such candor and insight. The Principles was James's first book, the Briefer Course his second. Ten years later he was to write another psycho­ logical masterpiece, The Varieties of Religious Experience. All these belong to the middle portion of his career. He had started as a student of medicine and as a naturalist (voyaging with Agassiz to the Amazon) . From 18 7 3 to 1907 he taught at Harvard, first in physiology then in psychology and finally in philosophy, with of course over­ lap in these stages of interest. In addition to writing a dozen books he carried on an extensive correspondence with leading citizens of his day. Many of his luminous letters, sparkling with comment on ideas and events, are reprinted in Perry's biography. It is safe to say that these letters alone would have brought fame, for they not only depict the era in which he lived, but reveal a character so urbane, so brilliant, and so tender that anyone who touches this life draws from it strength and inspiration. The key to his character seems to lie in his fierce integrity and compassion. He wanted always to face the human con­ dition fully and fearlessly. As Perry puts it, " i\o philosophy could possibly suit him that did not candidly recognize the dubious fortunes of mankind, and encourage him as a moral individual to buckle on his armor and go forth to battle." He was " too sensitive to ignore evil, too moral to tolerate it, and too ardent to accept it as inevitable." But for all his moralism James was a compassionate real­ ist. His view of the human predicament is as stark as that of a Kafka or a Camus, and his own countless acts of kind­ ness reflect his effort to improve the lot of his fellow mortals. While many modern existentialists see no escape from the anguish in life, James, though acknowledging its gravity, would certainly point to the hopeful and redemptive ca-

INTRODUCTION

'l{Xiii

pacities resident in most men, to their reservoir of courage, and to their freedom to find sustaining, and therefore true, beliefs. In contrast to many contemporary psychologists James does not stop with an examination of the mechanical routine of human behavior. He gives an equal place to the ca­ pacities for growth and discovery. In reading present-day psychology one often gains the impression that man is wholly a prisoner of his past learning, that he is somehow finished and done for. In reading James one feels that man is just beginning. Now, James would not dogmatically declare that his is the truer view of man. He would, however, invite us to take " the livelier option," for our choice of assumptions has effects on the human nature that we study. James warns psychologists that by their own theories of human nature they have the power of elevating or degrading this same nature. Debasing assumptions debase the mind; generous assumptions exalt the mind. His own assumptions were always the most generous possible. There is a sharp contrast between the expanding horizon of James and the constricting horizon of much contemporary psychology. The one opens doors to discovery, the other closes them. Much psychology today is written in terms of reaction, little in terms of becoming. James would say that a balance is needed, but that only by assuming that man has the capacity for growth are we likely to discover the scope of this same capacity. The reader of the Briefer Course can, if he wishes, apply the pragmatic test for himself. Does he find his horizon enlarged, his comprehension improved? Has he felt the pulse of human nature? Is he better equipped to lead his own life forward with fuller meaning and responsibility? If so, he will have discovered the truth that lies in the thought and character of William James. Harvard University November, 1960

INTRODUCTORY

Psychology Defined. The Definition of Psychology may be best given in the words of Professor Ladd, as the

sciousness as such.

description and explnnation of states of con­

By states of consciousness are meant such things

as sensations, desires, emotions, cognitions, reasonings, decision, volitions, and the like. Their "explanation" must of course include the study of their causes, conditions, and immediate consequences, so far as these can be ascertained.

Psychology is to be treated as a natural science in this book.

This

requires a word of commentary. Most thinkers have a faith that at bottom there is but one Science of all things, and that until all is known, no one thing can be completely known. Such a science, if realized, would be Philosophy. Meanwhile it is far from being realized; and instead of it, we have a lot of beginnings of knowledge made in different places, and kept separate from each other merely for practical convenience' sake, until with later growth they may run into one body of Truth. These provisional beginnings of learn­ ing we call "the Sciences" in the plural. In order not to be unwieldly, every such science has to stick to its own arbitrarily-selected prob­ lems, and to ignore all others. Every science thus accepts certain data unquestioningly, leaving it to the other parts of Philosophy to scrutinize their significance and truth. All the natural sciences, for example, in spite of the fact that farther reflection leads to Idealism, assume that a world of matter exists altogether independently of the perceiving mind. Mechanical Science assumes this matter to have "mass" and to exert "force," defming these terms merely phenomen­ ally, and not troubling itself about certain unintelligibilities which they present on nearer reflection. Motion similarly is assumed by mechanical science to exist independently of xxv

the mind, in spite of

xx vi

PSYCHOLOGY

the difficulties involved in the assumption. So Physics assumes atoms, action at a distance, etc. , uncritically; Chemistry uncritically adopts all the data of Physics; and Physiology adopts those of Chemistry. Psychology as a natural science deals with things in the same partial and provisional way. In addition to the "material world" with all its determinations, which the other sciences of nature assume, she assumes additional data peculiarly her own, and leaves it to more developed parts of Philosophy to test their ulterior significance and truth. These data are-

1. Thoughts and feelings, or whatever other names transitory states of consciousness may be known by. 2. Knowledge, by these states of consciousness, of other things. These things may be material objects and events, or other states of mind. The material objects may be either near or distant in time and space, and the states of mind may be those of other people, or of the thinker himself at some other time. How one thing can know another is the problem of what is called the Theory of Knowledge. How such a thing as a "state of mind" can be at all is the problem of what has been called Rational, as distinguished from Empirical, Psychology. The full

truth about states

of mind cannot be known until both Theory of Knowledge and Ra­ tional Psychology have said their say. Meanwhile an immense amount of provisional truth about them can be got together, which will work in with the larger truth and be interpreted by it when the proper time arrives. Such a provisional body of propositions about states of mind, and about the cognitions which they enjoy, is what I mean by Psychology considered as a natural science. On any ulterior theory of matter, mind, and knowledge, the facts and laws of Psychology thus understood will have their value. If critics find that this natural-science point of view cuts things too arbitrarily short, they must not blame the book which confines itself to that point of view; rather must they go on themselves to complete it by deeper thought. Incomplete statements are often practically necessary. To go beyond the usual "scientific" assumptions in the present case, would require, not a volume, but a shelfful of volumes, and by the present author such a shelfful could not be written at all. Let is also be added that the human mind is all that can be touch-

INTRODUCTORY

xxvii

ed upon in this book. Although the mental life of lower creatures has been examined into of late years with some success, we have no space for its consideration here, and can only allude to its manifestations incidentally when they throw light upon our own.

Mental facts cannot be properly studied apart from the physical environment of which they take cognizance. The great fault of the older rational psychology was to set up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own by which the several activities of remembering, imagining, reasoning, willing, etc., were explained, almost without reference to the peculiarities of the world with which these activities deal. But the richer insight of modern days perceives that our inner faculties are adapted in advance to the features of the world in which we dwell, adapted, I mean, so as to secure our safety and prosperity in its midst. Not only are our capacities for forming new habits, for remembering sequences, and for abstracting general properties from things and associating their usual consequences with them, exactly the faculties needed for steer­ ing us in this world of mixed variety and uniformity, but our emo­ tions and instincts are adapted to very special features of that world. In the main, if a phenomenon is important for our welfare, it in­ terests and excites us the first time we come into its presence. Dangerous things fill us with involuntary fear; poisonous things with distaste; indispensable things with appetite. Mind and world in short have been evolved together, and in consequence are some­ thing of a mutual fit. The special interactions between the outer order and the order of consciousness, by which this harmony, such as it is, may in the course of time have come about, have been made the subject of many evolutionary speculations, which, though they cannot so far be said to be conclusive, have at least refreshed and enriched the whole subject, and brought all sorts of new questions to the light. The chief result of all this more modern view is the gradually growing conviction that mental life is primarily teleological; that is to say, that our various ways of feeling and thinking have grown to be what they are because of their utility in shaping our reactions on the outer world. On the whole, few recent formulas have done more service in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence

xxviii

PSYCHOLOGY

of mental life and bodily life are one, namely, "the adjustment of inner to outer relations." The adjustment is to immediately present objects in lower animals and in infants. It is to objects more and more remote in time and space, and inferred by means of more and more complex and exact processes of reasoning, when the grade of mental development grows more advanced. Primarily then, and fundamentally, the mental life is for the sake of action of a preservative sort. Secondarily and incidentally it does many other things, and may even, when ill "adapted," lead to its possessor's destruction. Psychology, taken in the widest way, ought to study every sort of mental activity, the useless and harmful sorts as well as that which is "adapted." But the study of the harmful in mental life has been made the subject of a special branch called "Psychiatry" - the science of insanity- and the study of the useless is made over to "Aesthetics." Aesthetics and Psychiatry will receive no special notice in this book.

All mental states (no matter what their character as regards utility may be) are followed by bodily activity of some sort. They lead to inconspicuous changes in breathing, circulation, general muscular tension, and glandular or other visceral activity, even if they do not lead to conspicuous movements of the muscles of voluntary life. Not only certain particular states of mind, then (such as those called volitions, for example), but states of mind as such, all states of mind, even mere thoughts and feelings, are motor in their consequences. This will be made manifest in detail as our study advances. Mean­ while let it be set down as one of the fundamental facts of the science with which we are engaged. It was said above that the "conditions" of states of consciousness must be studied. The immediate condition of a state of consciousness

is an activity of some sort in the cerebral hemispheres. This pro­ portion is supported by so many pathological facts, and laid by physiologists at the base of so many of their reasonings, that to the medically educated mind it seems almost axiomatic. It would be hard, however, to give any short and peremptory proof of the uncondi­ tional dependence of mental action upon neural change. That a general and usual amount of dependence exists cannot possibly be ignored. One has only to consider how quickly consciousness may

INTRODUCTORY

xxix

be (so far as we know) abolished by a blow on the head, by rapid loss of blood, by an epileptic discharge, by a full dose of alcohol, opium, ether, or nitrous oxide-or how easily it may be altered in quality by a smaller dose of any of these agents or of others, or by a fever, -to see how at the mercy of bodily happenings our spirit is. A little stoppage of the gall-duct, a swallow of cathartic medicine, a cup of strong coffee at the proper moment, will entirely overturn for the time a man's views of life. Our moods and resolutions are more determined by the condition of our circulation than by our logical grounds. Whether a man shall be a hero or a coward is a matter of his temporary "nerves. " In many kinds of insanity, though by no means in all, distinct alterations of the brain-tissue have been found. Destruction of certain definite portions of the cerebral hemispheres involves losses of memory and of acquired motor facul­ ty of quite determinate sorts, to which we shall revert again under the title of aphasias. Taking all such facts together, the simple and radical conception dawns upon the mind that mental action may be uniformly and absolutely a function of brain-action, varying as the latter varies, and being to the brain-action as effect to cause. This conception is the "working hypothesis" which underlies all the "physiological psychlogy" of recent years, and it will be the work­ ing hypothesis of this book. Taken thus absolutely, it may possibly be too sweeping a statement of what in reality is only a partial truth. But the only way to make sure of its unsatisfactoriness is to apply it seriously to every possible case that can turn up. To work an hypothesis "for all it is worth" is the real, and often the only, way to prove its insufficiency. I shall therefore assume without scruple at the outset that the uniform correlation of brain-states with mind­ states is a law of nature. The interpretation of the law in detail will best show where its facilities and where its difficulties lie. To some readers such an assumption will seem like the most unjustifiable a priori materialism. In one sense it doubtless is materialism: it puts the Higher at the mercy of the Lower. But although we affirm that the coming to pass of thought is a consequence of mechanical laws, -for, according to another "working hypothesis, " that namely of physiology, the laws of brain-action are at bottom mechanical laws, -we do not in the least explain the nature of thought by affirming

xxx

PSYCHOLOGY

this dependence, and in that latter sense our proposition is not materialism. The authors who most unconditionally affirm the de­ pendence of our thoughts on our brain to be a fact are often the loudest to insist that the fact is inexplicable, and that the intimate essence of consciousness can never be rationally accounted for by any material cause. It will doubtless take several generations of psychologists to test the hypothesis of dependence with anything like minuteness. The books which postulate it will be to some extent on conjectural ground. But the student will remember that the Sciences constantly have to take these risks, and habitually advance by zigzag­ ging from one absolute formula to another which core r cts it by go­ ing too far the other way. At present Psychology is on the materialistic tack, and ought in the interests of ultimate success to

be allowed full headway even by those who are certain she will never fetch the port without putting down the helm once more. The only thing that is perfectly certain is that when taken up into the total body of Philosophy, the formulas of Psychology will appear with a very different meaning from that which they suggest so long as they are studied from the point of view of an abstract and trun­ cated "natural science," however practically necessary and indis­ pensable their study from such a provisional point of view may be.

The Divisions of Psychology So far as possible, then, we are to study states of consciousness in correlation with their probable neural conditions. Now the nervous system is well understood to-day to be nothing but a machine for receiving impressions and discharging reactions preservative to the individual and his kind- so much of physiology the reader will surely know. Anatomically, therefore, the nervous system falls into three main divisions, comprising-

1) The fibres which carry currents in 2) The organs of central redirection of them 3) The fibres which carry them out Functionally, we have sensation, central reflection, and motion, to correspond to these anatomical divisions. In Psychology we may

INTRODUCTORY divide our work according to a similar scheme,

xxxi

and treat successively

of three fundamental conscious processes and their conditions. The first will be Sensation; the second will be Cerebration or Intellec­ tion; the third will

be the Tendency

to Action. Much vagueness

results from this division, but it has practical conveniences for such a book as this, and they may be allowed to prevail over whatever objections may be urged.

Chapter I HABIT

Its Importance for

Psychology.

A n acquired habit, from the physiological point of view, is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents ever after tend to escape. That is the thesis of this chapter; and we shall see in the later and more psychological chapters that such functions as the association of ideas, perception, memory, reasoning, the education of the will, etc. etc ., can best be understood as results of the formation de novo of just such pathways of discharge. Habit has a physical basis. The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental proper­ ties of matter. The laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other. In the organic world, however, the habits are more variable than this. Even instincts vary from one individual to another of a kind; and are modified in the same in­ dividual , as we shall later see, to suit the exigencies of the case. On the principles of the atomistic philosophy the habits of an elementary particle of matter cannot change, because the particle is itself an unchangeable thing; but those of a compound mass of matter can change, because they are in the last instance due to the structure of the compound, and either outward forces or inward ten­ sions can, from one hour to another, turn that structure

PSYCHOLOGY

2

into something different from what it was. That is, they can do so if the body be plastic enough to maintain its integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields. The change of structure here spoken of need not involve the outward shape; it may be invisible and molecular, as when a bar of iron becomes magnetic or crystalline through the

action

of

certain

outward

causes,

becomes friable, or plaster ' sets.' rather slow;

or

india-rubber

All these changes are

the material in question opposes

a

certain

resistance to the modifying cause, which it takes time to overcome, but the gradual yielding whereof often saves the material from being disintegrated altogether.

When the

structure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition of its comparative permanence in the new form, and of the new. habits the body then manifests.

Plasticity, then, in

the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.

Each relatively stable

phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. especially nervous tissue,

seems

Organic matter,

endowed with a very ex­

traordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we may without hesitation lay down as our first proposition the following: that the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organi' materials of which their bodies are composed. The philosophy of habit is thus, in the first instance, a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or psychol­ ogy.

That it is at bottom a physical principle, is admitted

by all good recent writers on the subject.

They call atten­

tion to analogues of acquired habits exhibited by dead matter.

Thus, M. Leon Dumont writes:

" Every one knows how a garment, after having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new; there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit of cohesion.

A lock

works better after being used some time; at the outset more

HABIT

3

force was required to overcome certain roughness in the mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phe­ nomenon of habituation. It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been folded already ; . . . and just so in the nervous system the impressions of outer obj ects fashion for themselves more and more appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena recur under similar excitements from without, when they have been interrupted a certain time." Not in the nervous system alone. A scar anywhere is a locus minoris resistenti