A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

Fourthly, one and the same experience may have several meanings. Any dictionary is a proof of that! A lecturer may demonstrate the fact to a class by drawing on the blackboard, line by line, the figure of some such thing as, for instance, a desk-telephone. As the drawing proceeds, the lines may mean a pump, or a student lamp, or an electric portable, or a railway semaphore, or a jack, or various other things. In this case, to be sure, a single meaning is given when the drawing is complete; but there are plenty of experiences—a bit of bad handwriting, a distant object, an obscure patch in a painting—that leave us permanently unable to decide among several meanings. How often do we worry over a chance remark: it seemed to mean this, but could it have meant that, or is it possible that it really meant the other?

Fifthly, one and the same meaning may attach to several experiences. You walk into a room, and there see a table; you go into the same room in the dark and hurt yourself, and you complain that you ran against the table; you hear a noise overhead, and wish that the maid would not drag that table about. Here the meaning of a particular table is carried by three modes of perceptive experience. In certain forms of mental disorder one obsessing meaning colours all the experiences of the daily life. The patient “scents poison and treachery on all sides. He has slowly convinced himself by numerous tests in little things that he is no longer liked. The workmen are refractory and disobedient with him more than with anyone else. His chiefs and his fellows play malicious tricks upon him. His food tastes differently, and does not agree with him. When he goes to another town, it is plain that his enemies have anticipated him by writing letters to his injury.” Every experience that this man has means persecution.

Sixthly, meaning and mental process are not covariants. Richness and fullness of experience do not necessarily correspond with wealth of meaning; you may, in fact, be bewildered, and fail to find a meaning just because there is so much material to take in; your first hearing of a Wagner opera gave you, probably, more sound than sense. Conversely, poverty of experience does not necessarily mean loss or reduction of meaning; if that were the case, we could not pack so much meaning into such little things as words.

All this evidence would be greatly strengthened if we went beyond the limits of individual experience, and compared man with man, profession with profession, race with race, age with age. What is meaningless to me might be full of meaning to you; the same landscape yields different meanings to the geologist and the farmer; a protruded tongue means insult here, but politeness in Thibet; the art of the telegrapher would have spelled black magic a few centuries ago. Enough has perhaps been said to give plausibility, at any rate, to the statement that mental processes do not intrinsically mean, that meaning is not a constituent part of their nature; and that may suffice for the present; we shall come back again to meaning later. Value and use need hardly be discussed; they are, far more clearly than meaning, additional to (and detachable from) experience. If, however, the reader thinks that the point should be worked out in their case also, he may put them through the same sort of examination as that to which we have just subjected meaning; evidence will at once be forthcoming.

[§ 7]. The Scope of Psychology.—Science, like the Elephant’s Child in the story, is full of an insatiable curiosity. Just as the physicist reaches out, analysing and measuring, to the farthest limits of the stellar universe, so does the psychologist seek to explore every nook and corner of the world of mind; nay more, he will follow after a mere suspicion of mind; we have seen him trying to psychologise the plants. The result is a vast number of books and monographs and articles on psychology, written by men and women of very different interests, knowledge and training; for science does not advance on an ordered front, but still depends largely on individual initiative. A high authority on the Middle Ages has said that one mortal life would hardly suffice for the reading of a moderate part of mediæval Latin; and the psychologist must recognise, whether with pride or with despair, that one life-time is hardly enough for the mastery of even a single limited field of psychology. The student has to get clear on general principles, and then to resign himself to work intensively upon some special aspect of the subject-matter,—keeping as closely as he may in touch with his fellow-workers, and aiming to see his own labours in a just perspective, but realising that psychology as a whole is beyond his individual compass.

Does that sound exaggerated? Let us then attempt a rough classification! We begin with the psychology of the normal mind. Under this heading we have to distinguish (1) human psychology. Human psychology may be general, the psychology of the adult civilised man, which forms the principal topic of the text-books of psychology; special, the psychology of the human mind at some other stage of individual development: infancy, childhood, adolescence, senility; differential, the study of the differences between individual minds; or genetic, the study of the development of mind from childhood to manhood, and its gradual decay in old age. (2) Animal psychology may be subdivided, in the same way, into general, special, differential and genetic psychology. (3) Plant psychology is still in its first beginnings; but many students are taking the subject seriously. (4) Comparative psychology is the comparative study, either of various types of animal mind, or of the minds of plants, animals and man. It, again, may be general, special or genetic.

All these psychologies deal with the individual mind. There is also a collective psychology; and, though its divisions are not yet sharply marked off from one another, we may distinguish (5) social psychology, which includes the study of what is called the social consciousness, and also the scientific study of the products of the collective mind: language, law and custom, myth and religion; (6) ethnic psychology, the differential psychology of nations or races; and (7) class psychology, the differential psychology of classes or professions.

Turn now to the psychology of the abnormal mind. Here we find, under the heading of individual psychology, (8) the psychology of deficient and exceptional minds; of blind deaf-mutism, of genius, of the subnormal and the supernormal child; (9) the psychology of temporary mental derangement; of dream, of hypnosis, of intoxications, of occasional hallucination and illusion; and (10) the psychology of permanent mental disorder, of the chronic derangements of insanity. We may also study (11) the psychology of temporary derangement of the collective mind, that is, of the manias or mental epidemics that sometimes sweep society: the mediæval dance-manias, unmotived panics, outbursts of superstition, of religious persecution.

If we proceed further, from psychology proper to psychotechnics, or to what is ordinarily termed applied psychology, we have the great departments of (12) educational psychology, (13) medical psychology or psychotherapeutics, (14) juristic psychology, or the psychology of evidence and testimony, and (15) economic psychology, which includes such things as vocational psychology and the psychology of advertising.

You need not ascribe any special importance to this classification; still less need you memorise it. The various topics might very likely be better arranged, and the list is by no means complete. Realise, however, that every term in the list has its text-books and treatises, its manuals and monographs, and very likely its magazine or magazines; realise again that, although the emphasis varies in the different countries, the list might be filled out not alone in English, but in all the chief European tongues; and remember, lastly, that some of the headings have a very long history, and a correspondingly long series of printed works over and above those that represent current knowledge. You then get a glimmering of the range and scope of psychology. It is true, of course, that much of what has been printed is out of date, or inaccurate, or superficial, or prejudiced, and for these or like reasons may safely be scrapped. Yet it all has to be sifted.