Outlines of psychology / by Harald Höffding ; translated by Mary E. Lowndes.

  • Harald Høffding
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of psychology / by Harald Höffding ; translated by Mary E. Lowndes. 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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    OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY I SUBJECT AND METHOD OF PSYCHOLOGY I. Psychology is the science of mind—tliat is the shortest description we can give of the subject of the present inquiries. But it is merely a provisional description, yielding no clear and distinct conception. It serves merely to mark psychology as the science of that which thinks, feels, and wills, in contrast with physics as the science of that which moves in space and occupies space. These two provinces include everything that can be the subject of human research. Psychology is as little bound to begin with an explanation of what mind is, as physics is obliged to begin with an explanation of what matter is. And this general statement of the subject of psychology involves no assumption as to the question how far the mind exists, or does not exist, as an independent being distinct from matter. It will be our endeavour to preserve psychology as a pure science of experience, and to distinguish sharply between the given facts and the hypotheses employed to classify and explain them. But even in starting from the position that mental phenomena have certain characteristics which distinguish them from material, we presuppose a knowledge which was reached only at a certain stage of mental development, and of which we cannot even yet say that it is universal. It will set the subject of psychology in a « B
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