Mental development in the child and the race : methods and processes / by James Mark Baldwin.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mental development in the child and the race : methods and processes / by James Mark Baldwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    fere with the function of pleasure which Bain desiderates — i.e., some force that clenches and confirms, some suc- cessful chance coincidence ^ [of movement]. For as I have said, the successful chance coincidence would still give pleasure and the same association would hold between this pleasure and the particular movement which secured it. And under regular conditions of stimulation this associa- tion would suffice to draft off the increased energy of the pleasure process into the channels of the movement which is associated with the pleasure; for the organic basis of an association must be some kind of a connective pathway between the seats of the things which are associated. A later utterance of Bain's comes nearer, as far as I am sure that I understand it, to the recognition of my view of the general value of pleasure and pain in the theory of organic accommodation. He says in his last edition : ^ The law that a movement bringing pain tends to be arrested, and a movement bringing pleasure to be pro- moted, is with some plausibility referred to a general prin- ciple of nervous action, whereby, seeing that pleasure is in so many cases associated with increase, and pain with diminution, of vital energy, there should grow out of this circumstance a disposition of pleasure to feed, and of pain to sap its own producing energy [by an adaptation of movements by which the stimulation giving pleasure is retained, on one hand, and that giving pain broken with, on the other hand]. There is an undoubted consistency between the two sides of our being on this hypothesis [of what I have called an 'imitative ' or 'circular activity']. . . . The hypothesis in question demands for its ade- ^ See the quotation from Bain above. 2 Bain, Senses and Intellect, 4th ed., pp. 328 f.
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