Lectures on human and animal psychology / by William Wundt ; translated from the second German edition by J.E. Creighton & E.B. Titchener.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on human and animal psychology / by William Wundt ; translated from the second German edition by J.E. Creighton & E.B. Titchener. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    nothing more than a function of the substances of which the brain is composed. More particularly were the scientific investigators and physicians of the time inclined, by the character of their pursuits, to accept this explanation of mental life in terms of what seemed to them intelligible scientific facts. The Materialism of to-day has made no great advance in this or in any other direction upon the views promulgated in the last century, e.g. by de la Mettrie, and developed by Helvetius, Holbach. and others. But this equating of mental process and brain function, which makes psychology a department of cerebral physiology, and therefore a part of a general atomic mechanics, sins against the very first rule of scientific logic.—that only those connections of facts may be regarded as causal which obtain between generically similar phenomena. Our feelings, thoughts, and volitions cannot be made objects of sensible perception. We can hear the word which expresses the thought, we can see the man who has . thought it, we can dissect the brain in which it arose ; but the wordttheman, and the brain are not the thought. And the blood which circulates in the brain, the chemical changes which take place there, are wholly different from the act of thought itself. Materialism, it is true, does not assert that these are the thought, but that they form it. As the liver secretes bile, as the muscle exerts motor force, so do blood and brain, heat and electrolysis, produce idea and thought. But surely there is no small difi'erence between the two cases. We can prove that bile arises in the liver by chemical processes which we are able, in part at least, to follow out in detail. We can show, too, that movement is produced in muscles by definite processes, which are again the immediate result of chemical transformation. But cerebral processes give us no shadow of indication as to how our mental life comes into being. For the two series of phenomena are not comparable. We can conceive how one motion may be transformed into another, perhaps also how one sensation or feeling is transformed into a second. But no system of cosmic mechanics can make plain to us how a motion can pass over into a sensation or feeling. At the same time modern Materialism pointed out a more
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