Outlines of psychology / by James Sully.

  • Sully, James, 1842-1923.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of psychology / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    the accompanying mental processes. This department of Physio- logical Psychology has been particularly successful in elucidating the more elementary processes of mind, sensation, and conscious movement. It is through a careful and exact study of the correlations of psychical process and nervous action that the range of experiment in psychology has mainly been enlarged. Indeed, the possibility of applying the experimental test to psychical phenomena is put forward as one of the great advantages of this conjoint or con- current study of the psychical and the physical. The first direc- tion of this experimental inquiry was into the relations of qua?itity between the elementary phenomena of sensation and the con- nected nervous processes. Thus it was asked how much light- stimulus must act on the eye before a sensation of light is produced. This line of inquiry is sometimes specially marked off as ' Psycho-physics'.^ Mind and its Environment: Social Conditions. The activity of the nervous system is related to the events taking place in the environment of the organism in our common external world. It is by the action of external forces or stimuli (light, sound, etc.) that the organs of the system are first excited to their functional activity. On the other hand, the outcome of this functional activity is a reaction of the organism on its environ- ment in the shape of a muscular action or movement, which serves to modify external arrangements in some way, or at least its own relations to the environment, e.g., in all actions tending to self-preservation. Hence the psychologist, in including nervous conditions in his view of mind, is necessarily led on to a considera- tion of the relations of the organism to the environment. Thus he has to make reference to the stimuli (light, etc.) acting on the organs of sense. 1 Fechner used the terms psycho-physic, psycho-physical, with reference to the relation of the psychical element, sensation, to the external physical agent or ' stimulus,' e.g., light ; but of late the term psycho-physical has- come to refer to the correlation of the psychical phenomenon with the nervous process.