Consciousness / by Henry Rutgers Marshall.

  • Henry Rutgers Marshall
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Consciousness / by Henry Rutgers Marshall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/712
    only as a special division, and such a treatise I had ;small hopes of being able to write. This sketch of a systematic Psychology was completed in July, 1891, and corresponds in its main lines with the matter presented in the Second Book of this work. During the intervening years I have endeavored, in all my psychological studies, to test the validity of the general scheme then outlined ; and having found that my con- ceptions of mental life have been materially clarified by its use, it has seemed worth while to put it in such shape that any value it may have may be tested by other workers in the same field. Book III. in which I treat of the nature of the Self has been developed in connection with this attempt to make a systematic analysis of our mental states : but the thesis as to the nature of the Self, although developed later, has become an important component part of the whole as here presented. In a work which aims to cover ground that has been the subject of thought of many masters, the reader will not be surprised to find much that is far from new ; but he will pardon this when he notes that my aim is to pre- sent for his consideration not so much an array of newly discovered facts, but rather a special manner of viewing Consciousness as a whole, by which, it appears to me, we are enabled to treat the problems of Psychology in a more scientific and orderly manner than is possible from the points of view usually taken. In what I have said above I have spoken of this work as an essay in Psychology. But I shall be prepared to find some trained metaphysician who may read the opening sections of the first chapter proclaiming that I, at the very start, make assumptions which necessarily involve meta- physical considerations, and that I write as though I had never heard of Berkeley or Fichte, not to mention Locke,