An introduction to psychology / by F. Aveling.

  • Francis Aveling
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An introduction to psychology / by F. Aveling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/184 page 77
    forms ; and by association these are bound into wholes, not merely in the developing mental life of the individual, but racially also. Associa¬ tions formed in early social experience, animal or human, are stamped in and transmitted by heredity. There is thus a reconciliation of innate ideas and experience ; the universal and necessary elements of thought coming, not from individual experience, but from that of the race. They are the result of past history recorded in hereditary neural arrangements of the brain. Feelings, emotions and will are reduced to aspects of complex sensory processes, the com¬ plexity of which is conceived on analogy with chemical compounds, rather than as the result of summation or mere addition. Here isjao hint of any synthetic or creative activity of a conscious self in respect of its own mental contents ; the psychology is a wholly structural one. Indeed self, as mind-substance, is for Spencer only an unknowable something postulated to explain persistence and unity, in spite of all changes, in the aggregate of states of consciousness. Like all associationisms and structuralisms, Spencer’s psychology is now outgrown. It was none the less a contribution of worth, focussing attention upon the naturalistic evolution of mind as a subject of special study. It indicated the place of psychology among the other biological 77 'it (f L'XI fu-c, T;, . £ I ^ v t l?fvM, • ft*T . , * V V / f t A C t . i l U (
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