Volume 1

Analytic psychology.

  • George Frederick Stout
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Analytic psychology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    rapidity and certainty, and the minimum of obstruction and failure, and corresponding effort. At the outset of the pro- cess of acquisition, muscles are contracted which are super- fluous, and which therefore operate as disturbing conditions. Others are not contracted at the right moment, and in the right measure, so that action is deranged. Now the effort to attain the end is, eo ipso, an effort to avoid failure and obstruc- tion ; hence there will be a constant tendency to alter muscular adjustments in so far as they are unsuccessful. Hence arise gradual approximations to success, and it is these which the principle of repetition permanently retains, while all that be- longs to the process of trial, as such, disappears. In this way a fixed and uniform series of movements is organised, which can go on of itself without conscious effort,—without trial and failure. The counterpart in physiological terms of the psychological principle of finality, is the tendency of neural systems to a state of virtual stability.1 Conation is the psychological counterpart of the process by which a neural system regains equilibrium after disturbance. In the terminology of Ave- narius, the initial disturbance is called the vital difference, and the return to equilibrium is called the vital series. In the case of fully established habit, the vital difference evokes a fixed form of vital series, which is repeated in a comparatively uni- form way whenever the disturbing conditions recur. Thus, the state of equilibrium which results from the vital series is approximately the same as the state which precedes the occur- rence of the vital difference. During the formation of habit this is otherwise. On each occasion, the resulting state of equilibrium is a different state from that which existed prior to the disturbance. Hence each successive vital difference and vital series will be appreciably altered in nature, because in each case the neural preformation which suffers disturbance