Psychological principles / by James Ward.

  • James Ward
Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

    46/504 page 26
    from the known to the unknown, then Analytic Psychology, starting from human experience should precede any attempt to treat of the genesis of experience as a whole, or to correlate psychology with physiology. And when psychology is regarded not simply as ancillary to philosophy or theology, but is studied throughout with scientific impartiality, there are happily facts in plenty within the range of human experience, though long over¬ looked as trivial or unimportant, which throw far more light on, say the problem of instinct, than biology alone could ever bring to bear. But in truth there is no question of a choice of methods: in every case physiological and comparative psychology must fall back on the facts and analogies of our own experience. The standpoint of Psychology as individualistic. § 7. We conclude then that psychology cannot be defined by reference to a special subject-matter as such concrete sciences, for example, as mineralogy and botany can be; and yet, since it deals in some sort with the whole of experience, it is obviously not an abstract science in any ordinary sense of that term. To be characterized at all, it must be characterized by the standpoint from which this experience is viewed. This standpoint is some¬ times termed ‘individualistic,’ that of the so-called object- sciences being distinguished as ‘universalistic.’ But both alike are to be regarded as ‘objective’ in the sense of being true for all—consisting of what Kant would call judgments of experience. For psychology is not biography in any sense, least of all bio¬ graphy as dealing with idiosyncrasies, and in an idiom having an interest and a meaning for one subject only, and incommuni¬ cable to any other. Locke, Berkeley and Hume have been justly censured because they regarded the critical investigation of knowledge as a psychological problem, and set to work to study the individual mind simply for the sake of this problem. But none the less their standpoint was the proper one for the science of psychology itself; and, however surely their philosophy was foredoomed to failure, there is no denying a steady psycho¬ logical advance as we pass from Locke to Hume and his modern representatives. By ‘idea’ Locke tells us he means “whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” (i.e. is conscious). But shut in within such a circle of ideas he found
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3