A manual of psychology / by G.F. Stout.

  • George Frederick Stout
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A manual of psychology / by G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    715/800 page 691
    displaces, often though not always completely, the pleasures of imagination. In general, the thought of a pleasing object which is recognised as beyond our reach gives pain rather than pleasure when there is a desire for its actual possession. To enjoy the pleasure of ideal revival in the case of unattainable objects, we must be able to adopt the attitude of imagination or make-believe, and this is very often impossible. § 3. Feeling-Tone of Ideational Activity itself. Belief. —Ideational activity may assume two forms. On the one hand, it may be directed to the production of some new result in the real world, or to the increase of our knowledge of the real world; on the other hand, it may be a mere play of the imagination. The conditions of pleasure and pain in the two cases are not quite the same, and it will be well to treat them separately. In both cases whatever furthers activity so as to make it more efficient, conduces to pleasure; and whatever obstructs it and makes it in- efficient, conduces to pain. We shall consider first those trains of ideas which are directed towards the production of real results or the increase of knowledge. Two modes of furtherance and obstruction may be distinguished,—the material and the formal. Material obstacles consist in ideally foreseen circum- stances which would actually bar the way to the execution of a plan or to the occurrence of a desired event. As Spinoza says, whatever hinders the body’s power of acting hinders the mind’s power of thinking; whatever would, in fact, obstruct the execution of a plan, obstructs the forma- tion of the plan, when it is ideally foreseen. If I am planning an excursion and discover that the railway arrangements at a certain place are fatal to its execution, this circumstance arrests the flow of my ideas just as it
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