Psychological principles / by James Ward.

  • James Ward
Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychological principles / by James Ward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    We shall perhaps start best by means of a brief historical retrospect. It is by knowledge of others that the child advances to consciousness of itself: it is aware of third persons, even of itself as one of these, before it realises its unique position as first person. And when at length this unique position is first realised it is very apt to be unduly predominant, as we frequently notice in the excessive or morbid so-called self-co?isciousness of youth. A like order and one-sidedness is evident in the growth of psychology: it was first unduly ‘objective’ and then unduly ‘subjective’: it is only now beginning to shew signs of maturity in a due balance of the two : the fundamental concept of the first period was Life, that of the second, Mind, that of the third is Experience. To understand this last then we must consider the other two in turn. An intelligent person beginning to study de novo the broad facts which here concern us, unaided and unimpeded by tra¬ ditional or current theories, would almost certainly not do, what according to Tristram Shandy Locke did, that is, write ‘ a history book of what passes in his own mind.’ He would in all pro¬ bability fail to distinguish sharply between the facts of mind and the facts of life which he observed on all sides : the close connexion, that is to say, of living mind and living body would conceal their duality. At any rate this was the case with primi¬ tive thought, as philology and anthropology amply prove. But it is needless to go back further than Aristotle, whose De anima marks the birth of Psychology as a separate science. Let us note then that Aristotle—in sharp contrast to Descartes, whom, rather than Locke, we may regard as inaugurating the second period,—began his study of mind from the side of body. He divided natural bodies into those that have, and those that have not, life. The former in all cases consisted of organs mutually adapted to a specific end : they were, as we now say, organisms, or rather potential organisms. The conception of opyavov, tool or instrument, was fundamental with Aristotle. It led him to his famous doctrine of the four causes. An axe, for example, was (i) matter, (2) having a particular form, which (3) set in motion by the woodman realised (4) his end, the felling of timber. If we regarded an axe as an organism, we should say that wood-cutting was its soul, the realisation of the meaning of a body of that kind : in a timberless desert it might be called
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