(12) You should analyse some sentiments at first hand. Ask a friend to write out a number of descriptions, statements, questions, that have evoked in his own experience the sentiments (say) of belief and doubt, or of honour and ambiguity. Let him arrange them in pairs: belief-doubt, honour-ambiguity. Then take a pair, and read the two statements in quick succession. You will be surprised to find how matter-of-course and indifferent your attitude is; but presently some member of a pair will grip you, start you thinking; and you will then have the opportunity to observe. Write out (or better, dictate) a full report.
J. Sully, The Human Mind, ii., 1892, ch. xvi.; An Essay on Laughter, 1902, ch. v.; W. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 1896, Lect. xxv., § 4; Ethics, i., 1897, ch. iii.; T. Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, 1897, chs. vi. ff.; E. B. Titchener, Text-book of Psychology, 1910, 500 ff.; E. L. Thorndike, The Original Nature of Man, 1913, 41, 102 f., 140 f.
Special References: F. Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911; J. H. Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion, 1912; L. Hearn, Japan, An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904; A. C. Haddon, Evolution in Art, 1895; G. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, 1896; G. Moore, Modern Painting, 1898.
[CHAPTER XII]
Self and Consciousness
The savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person denominated by it is a real and substantial bond. In fact, primitive man regards his name as a vital portion of himself, and takes care of it accordingly.—Sir James Frazer
§ 73. The Concept of Self.—We said on p. 9 that the word mind is used by the psychologist as an inclusive name for all the phenomena of the psychological world, that is to say, of the world with man left in. We then found, on p. 10, that the man left in reduces to a functional nervous system. This means, of course, that there are as many psychological worlds as there are separate nervous systems; so that the psychological world, which the psychologist tries to describe, is in reality an average or generalize world; though the observations upon which his descriptions rest are always made upon this or that particular world. The same thing holds of any science. A boy picks up a bit of jagged stone, and with a jerk of his wrist flips it across the road. No physicist could tell you the exact course described by that stone, and no physicist wants to. Physics deals with the ideal course of ideal projectiles hurled under fixed conditions; the boy and the jerk and the jagged stone are all generalised away into some mathematically smooth trajectory. The observations of physics, on the other hand, are made by men working under conditions that are not ideal, and using instruments that differ from the wrist and the stone only in degree, not in kind; the smooth curve is derived from data all of which have their margin of empirical error.