文档介绍：THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY 1
The Principles of Psychology
By William James
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THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY 2
CHAPTER I
The Scope of Psychology
Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions. The
phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the
like; and, superficially considered, their variety plexity is such as to leave a chaotic
impression on the observer. The most natural and consequently the earliest way of unifying the
material was, first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, to affiliate the diverse mental
modes thus found, upon a simple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are taken to be so many
facultative manifestations. Now, for instance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of
Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its Appetite. This is the orthodox
'spiritualistic' theory of scholasticism and mon-sense. Another and a less obvious way of
unifying the chaos is to mon elements in the divers mental facts rather than mon
agent behind them, and to explain them constructively by the various forms of arrangement of
these elements, as one explains houses by stones and bricks. The 'associationist' schools of
Herbart in Germany, and of Hume, the Mills and Bain in Britain, have thus constructed a
psychology without a soul by taking discrete 'ideas,' faint or vivid, and showing how, by their
cohesions, repulsions, and forms [] of ession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions,
emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an individual's mind may
be engendered. The very Self or ego of the es in this way to be viewed no longer
as the pre-existing source of the representations, but rather as their last and plicated
fruit.
Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the ph