Volume 1

Analytic psychology / by G.F. Stout.

  • George Frederick Stout
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Analytic psychology / by G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    science. This point will be best brought out by considering the attempts which have been made to maintain an opposite doctrine. It is urged by certain physiologists that the only way of explaining the phenomena of consciousness is by con- necting them with the physical phenomena of the brain and nervous system. From this standpoint the science of mind is regarded as occupying an analogous position to the sciences of sound, heat, and electricity. As sound or light is susceptible ■of scientific treatment only when it is considered as con- ditioned by certain modes of motion, so it is held that con- sciousness in general can only be successfully investigated when neural processes are made to play the same part in psychology as do the vibrations of air and of aether in acoustics and optics. But the supposed analogy between the cases of sound or light, and that of consciousness, is not a just one. The phenomena of sound as given to the ear, or •of colour as given to the eye, are not themselves capable of supplying subject-matter for a physical science, because they are not connected inter se according to a fixed and systematic order. The uniformities, or approaches to uniformity, which are susceptible of being formulated in terms of colour, or of •sound as such, are inadequate to form the basis of a system of interdependent truths. The same fact is expressed, though in a misleading way, when sounds, colours, etc., are said to be subjective in contradistinction from their objective mechanical conditions, or when they are called secondary as opposed to primary qualities. In any case, it is implied that there neither is nor can be a science of light as seen, or of sound as heard, or of heat as felt. If in like manner mental pro- cesses were incapable of being reduced to a definite order of co-existence and sequence inter se, there would be no such thing as psychology. The distinctive aim of the psychologist is to investigate mental events themselves, not their mechani- cal accompaniments or antecedents. If the course of mental
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