Psychological principles / by James Ward.

James Ward

Date:: 1918

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

49/504 page 29

GENERAL ANALYSIS Psychology and Epistemology. § i. We have just seen that in seeking to make a first general analysis of experience, we must start from individual human experience ; for it is this alone that we immediately know. From this standpoint we have now to endeavour to determine the ‘ irreducible minimum ’ which all experience in¬ volves ; in other words, to reach a concept applicable to every other form of experience as well as to our own. Etymologi¬ cally experience connotes practical acquaintance, efficiency and skill as the result of trial—usually repeated trial—and effort. Many recent writers on comparative psychology propose to make evidence of experience in this sense the criterion of psychical life. The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib, and so would pass muster; but the ant and the bee, since they are said to learn nothing, would, in spite of their marvellous instinctive skill, be regarded as mere automata in Descartes’s sense. That this criterion is decisive on the positive side will hardly be denied; the question how far it is available negatively we must examine later on. Experience is the process of becoming expert by experiment, let us say meanwhile. It will be well next briefly to note some of the implications of this positive criterion. The chief implication, no doubt, is that which in psychological language we express as the duality of subject and object—already strenuously insisted on in the preceding chapter. Looking at this relation as the comparative psycho¬ logist has to do, we find that it tallies in the main with the biological relation of organism and environment. The indi¬ viduality of the organism corresponds to, though it is not identical with, that of the psychological subject; while to the

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