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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    organic evolution, and human experience to be the summit of a long progressive series. Now this idea of gradual evolution has certainly exerted a powerful influence upon modern psychology. It is the less surprising therefore—especially when we remember the defects of the older psychology—to find that the attempt is now frequently made to treat psychology wholly according to the historical, or as it is oftener called, the genetic, method. In biology such a procedure is possible ; for the protozoan as well as man, the paragon of animals, is equally accessible as an organism. But the only experience immediately accessible to us is our own, and this—in spite of its complexity—is the first we know and the one we know best. Lower forms of experience, notwith¬ standing their greater simplicity, we know later and know less. Accordingly all attempts—regardless of this difference—to treat of human experience as merely the culmination of a long but entirely objective development, have so far been marked by serious defects. The start is avowedly physiological—from what is metaphorically described as ‘organic behaviour/ meaning thereby such adaptability of organism to environment as seems to be determined solely and completely by the organism’s structure, and from its apparently automatic and invariable character to require merely mechanical explanations. Later on, psychological conceptions are gradually introduced to eke out the shortcomings of the mechanical interpretation, when the spontaneity of the behaviour and its varying adjustment to varying conditions suggest that the machine is more or less under guidance. So, as we advance, we pass as it were insensibly from biology proper to psychology proper, from the living protoplasm of the Amoeba to the living experience of man. We began with mechanism and we end with mind. But the psychology, when we reach it, is apt to be of the Presentational or Sensational type, since a psychology of this type can be most readily equated to the physiology from which the exposition set out. We have, that is to say, a ‘physiological psychology’ of the very worst sort; where physiological and psychological conceptions are for ever coquetting with each other, and where, as a result, unseemly hybrids are not infrequent1. If it be a sound maxim to proceed 1 Cf. e.g. Huxley’s ‘ ideagenous molecules ’ as ‘ a physical basis of memory,’ Collected Essays, I. p. 239.
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