The psychology of association / by Felix Arnold.

  • Arnold, Felix, 1879-
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychology of association / by Felix Arnold. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    amount of heat, (3) a growing quantity of waste material and (4) an increase in the flow of blood. Conditions thus existing would be different from the normal, and the total result would be a certain sensation of heaviness, which would be added to the above muscular feelings. In whatever manner it is considered, the feeling by consciousness of its own stream is a myth. When we consider what we mean by effort this becomes still more evident. Effort put forth presupposes something to which the organism reacts and something to which a proper adjustment has not yet been attained. A satisfactory atti- tude is reached only after a number of trials. Effort is possible both physically and mentally, and all possible variations can exist. The popular superstition that the effort felt is a measure of the work done still clings to the concept with many good people. ‘To work by the sweat of one’s brow’ has become proverbial, yet the sweat and the strain do not necessarily show that any special work has been accom- plished. In all such cases the sense of effort shows simply that some incompetency, transient or permanent, exists in the subject, that too much has been undertaken or that the difficulties have been too great; which simply means a lack of power in the subject for that special task. Sense of effort means that energy has been wasted as far as the accomplishment of the task is concerned; that the attitude aimed at has not been realized or, if so, only after a number of unsuccessful attempts. In mental effort we have a similar alternation of attitudes, but in a less degree. This agrees with the feeling in many who have put forth physical effort that the latter kind is much greater than mental effort taken as such. To put it popularly, it is much harder to shovel a ton of coal than to think out a scheme of passing it along without shoveling. Some are inclined to place mental effort as greater than physical, because they look at the effects of the former and associate these effects with the effort as actually felt. Mental effort is much more likely to leave behind after-effects which are injurious, but these have nothing to do with the effort as felt. The view of effort as pre- sented above also does away with the objection offered to James’ ‘backstroke’ theory by Stout, viz., that if feeling of effort arises from motor innervations, the actions themselves ought to give rise to a more intense sense of effort. As a matter of fact they do. Thus far I have endeavored to show that neither by introspection nor by any hypothesis of a consciousness aware of its own stream can we have any mental state in which consciousness does not have an object, and that in the present. I shall now try to show that the same holds for feeling and emotion. The James-Lange theory is too well known to need any lengthy
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