A primer of psychology / by Edward Bradford Titchener.

  • Titchener, Edward Bradford, 1867-1927.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A primer of psychology / by Edward Bradford Titchener. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    law, religion and morals naturally overlap to a con- siderable extent in all forms of society. Lastly, (4) ethnic psychology has to deal with the Art. growth of arty regarded as the play of the adult (§ 100). ' Some psychologists regard the aesthetic as a sub-form of the religious sentiment, and would therefore derive art from myth. The question cannot at present be decided; but it seems probable that art is as distinct from myth as myth is from custom. The farther back we go in the history of humanity, the more difficult does it become to separate the products of the collective mind, — to say : this belongs to mythology, this to aesthetics, this to morals, this to custom. The primitive social mind, like the primitive individual mind (§ 48), is a one-tissue mind; differentiation means a rela- tively high stage of development. In the case of art the difficulty is unusually great, owing The origin of to the variety of purposes which the aesthetic sentiment has the ®sthetlc J r r 4 sentiment. been made to serve (courtship, religion, play). It has been suggested that that is beautiful, to primitive man, which he regards as expressing a pleasurable emotion. We must remember that anything (a tree, a weapon) might be thus regarded; for everything was interpreted after the human pattern. The beautiful woman was, then, the woman who expressed pleasure in the man’s bodily adornment, the woman in whose face he read the reflection of his own pride ; the beautiful landscape was the ‘ smiling ’ landscape ; the beautiful jar or bow was that in whose look or action the mechanic refound his own self-satisfied pleasure ; and so on. The theory is plausible : it is as yet very far from proved. § 121. The Relation of Psychology to Ethics and Logic. — Ethics is the science of conduct. Its problem is stated by Herbert Spencer in the following words : “ I conceive it to be the business of Moral Science to deduce,