A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    42/446 page 24
    one, save the psychologist, realizes. In the experience of many people these altogether crowd out concrete imaginings. We suppose ourselves to be imagining the Heraion at Argos, the “Madonna della Sedia,” or Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhap¬ sody,” when, as a matter of fact, we are mainly saying to ourselves the words ‘Heraion,’ ‘madonna,’ ‘rhapsody.’ Of course this is an artificial state of affairs. Words are con¬ ventional symbols, not instinctive reactions; they play no part at all in the imaginative life of animal or of baby, and little part in that of the savage. The civilized being, however, is born into a world of people whose most char¬ acteristic activity is neither eating, walking, nor fighting, but talking. At first, through pure imitation, and afterwards because he recognizes the utility of language, he largely occu¬ pies himself with words, first heard and spoken, and later read and written. And as habits fall away through disuse, so, little by little, in the experience of most of us, word-images take the place of concreter images of color, sound, and the like. It is unnecessary to dwell on the immense utility of verbal imagination, for we are already victims of what Mr. Garrison calls ‘the ignorant prejudice in favor of reading and writing,’ and, he might have added, ‘of talking.’ Words serve not only as the means of communication, and thus as the surest method of social development, but — by their abstract, conventional form — as an aid to rapid memorizing and to clear reasoning; they are indispensable parts of our intel¬ lectual equipment; yet they are in themselves but poor and insignificant experiences, and they work us irreparable harm if they banish, from the life of our imagination, the warm colors, broad spaces, liquid sounds, and subtle fragrances which might enrich and widen our experience.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image