Elements of psychology / by George Croom Robertson ; edited from notes of lectures delivered at the college, 1870-1892, by C.A. Foley Rhys Davids.

Robertson, George Croom, 1842-1892.

Date:: 1896

Credit: Elements of psychology / by George Croom Robertson ; edited from notes of lectures delivered at the college, 1870-1892, by C.A. Foley Rhys Davids. Source: Wellcome Collection.

271/292 (page 251)

$r ? I j XXXVI.] Elements of Psychology. 251 f this kind, which is essentially voluntary, is called apperception. { But apperception includes also reflective thinking, con- ^ structive imagination. With Professor Wundt it comes to 1 j be synonymous with attention. I Belief. I The state of belief has not been well classed by Professor Bain under Will on the ground of its manifesting itself by readiness to act. Belief is not covered by Will, is not funda- mentally conational. It is one thing to believe, another to act, another to will to believe. This I shall treat of in the course on General Philosophy. f Note.—The student will find instructive reading on the psychology 1 of ‘ Genius ’ in the last chapter of Professor Sully’s The Human Mind, t ‘On Concrete Mental Development,’ a chapter which (in Croom 2 Robertson’s words) ‘ deals in an interesting way with such topics j as the unity of mental development, varieties of mind, scientific view I of individuality, dreams, the hypnotic trance, and pathological * psychoses.’ k On the psychology of ‘ ideal construction ’ or constructive imagina- ' tion let him note another passage from the same appreciative criticism I of Professor Sully’s treatment of this subject {Mind, i, N. S., 413) :— ’ ‘Productive imagination is the subject of the next chapter {The *1 Human Mind), i, p. 362 et seq.). The general process of ideal \ construction, the distinction between its receptive and creative phases, the characteristic peculiarities of intellective, practical, and i £esthetic imagination, are successively handled in a luminous and i instructive way. The account of the constructive process seems to * us defective in one point. It seems to be implied that the appropriate * filling in of the scheme or ‘draft image’ in which all mental produc- J tion is rightly held to consist, merely depends on suggestion by j contiguity and similarity together with voluntary selection and rejection of the material so supplied. It ought, I think, to have been$