A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

It seems, however, that the prime factor in the common-sense notion of mind is the idea of activity. We ascribe to mind the same sort of voluntary and purposeful activity that we ascribe to our fellow-men; and we distinguish this activity from the blind necessity of cause and effect. We find ourselves, and those about us, deliberating, intending, resolving, planning, recalling, doubting; and we say that these and similar activities are activities of mind. We also find ourselves, and those about us, breathing, secreting, moving; but here we draw distinctions. Breathing, we say, is a physical affair, though we may hold the breath by an act of will. Secretion results from some physical or chemical cause; only if we cry for sorrow or sweat for fear is mind influencing body. Walking and blinking may be physical only; but if we turn our steps by intention into a certain path, or blink on purpose to clear our sight, the physical movements become subject to the action of mind.

So long as we stick to examples, all this seems straightforward; only it is not easy to decide whether mind is activity, or whether these various activities are activities of mind. On the whole, common sense leans to the latter view: the activities are manifestations of mind. Mind itself is then something immaterial, lying behind the manifestations. What sort of thing? Apparently, another human being, an inner man that dwells within the outer man, an insubstantial mannikin living inside the head. Does that sound absurd? But it did not seem absurd just now to read that we ascribe to mind the same sort of voluntary and purposeful activity that we ascribe to our fellow-men; and how could we do that unless mind were something like a human being? This inner man appears, in fact, to be the mind of common sense; the inner man thinks, reflects, remembers, desires; he is influenced by the outer man, becoming gloomy and morose when his host cannot digest; and he influences the outer man, who sheds tears when his inmate is grieved. A curious view, when we write it out and think of it in cold logic; but a view that we should understand if we traced the growth of common sense from its first beginnings; and a view of highly respectable antiquity. Very ancient superstitions are connected with the man who is seen in the eye; the Egyptian ka or spirit-double is a smaller copy of the outer man; Greek vase-paintings show the human soul as a tiny human being; primitive thought has from time immemorial explained, and the modern savage still explains, the life and motion of man, or his repose in sleep and death, by the presence or absence of the little creature normally at work within him.

Yet however natural a view like this may be, science can make nothing of it. For one thing, it merely pushes the problem a step further back. The inner man acts on the outer man and is acted on by him; but who or what gives the inner man, in his turn, the power to influence and to be influenced? We must suppose an endless nest of mannikins. That and other such arguments apart, however, the view is non-scientific because it offers an interpretation and not a description of mind. The mind with which psychology deals must be a mind that is describable in terms of observed fact; otherwise it cannot form the subject-matter of a science. So we must start afresh, and ask what mind is, when mind is looked at from the scientific point of view.

You will better understand the answer to this question when you have worked through the book. The answer will then have been given in the concrete and particular; now it can be given only in the abstract and general. Remember that it is given, nevertheless, in terms of work done and results obtained; it is not an answer that the psychologist makes up beforehand, but one that he himself has been led to in the course of his attempt to work scientifically upon mind. In brief it is this.

We find that the field of science has been surveyed from two different standpoints. Men of science have set out, on the one hand, to describe the world as it would be with man left out. The result is what we call physical science. The world of physics is colourless, toneless, neither cold nor warm; its spaces are always of the same extent, its times are always of the same duration, its mass is invariable; it would be just what it is now if mankind were swept from the face of the earth. For what is light in the text-books of physics?—a train of electromagnetic waves; and sound is a vibratory motion of air or water; and heat is a dance of molecules; and all these things are independent of man. But men of science have tried, on the other hand, to describe the world as it is in man’s experience, as it appears with man left in; and the result of this endeavour is psychology. The world of psychology contains looks and tones and feels; it is the world of dark and light, of noise and silence, of rough and smooth; its space is sometimes large and sometimes small, as everyone knows who in adult life has gone back to his childhood’s home; its time is sometimes short and sometimes long; it has no invariables. It contains also the thoughts, emotions, memories, imaginations, volitions that you naturally ascribe to mind; it contains, that is, so much of these things as belongs to the sphere of observable fact. It is obviously very different from the world of physics, though both worlds alike have been opened up to us by science, by the impersonal and disinterested search for facts.

So we have a world of matter and a world of mind. The physicist, however, describes and measures the various phases of energy, without assuming any material substance in the background, any matter of which this energy is the manifestation. Matter, if the word is to be used at all, is simply the inclusive name for all the forms of energy. And the psychologist, in the same way, describes and measures—so far as he is able to measure—the phenomena of his world, without assuming any active or perduring mind in the background; for him, mind is simply the inclusive name of all these phenomena. That is the first rough answer to our question. Much more must be said, if the answer is to be precise; but even as it is we have travelled a long way from the little man living inside the head!

[§ 3]. Mind and Body.—The first thing to get clear about is the nature of the man left in the world, the man whose presence is necessary for psychology and unnecessary for physics. Since we are talking science, this man will be man as science views him, and not the man of common sense; he will be, that is, the organism known to biology as homo sapiens, and not the self-centred person whom we meet in the everyday world of values. But the human organism owes its organic character, the organisation of its parts into a single whole, to its nervous system. All over the body and all through the body are dotted sense-organs, which take up physical and chemical impressions from their surroundings; these impressions are transmitted along nerve-fibres to the brain; in the brain they are grouped, arranged, supplemented, arrested, modified in all sorts of ways; and finally, it may be after radical transformation in the brain, they issue along other nerve-fibres to the muscles and glands. The nervous system thus receives, elaborates, and emits. Moreover, there is strong evidence to show that the world which psychology explores depends for its existence upon the functioning of the nervous system; or, if we prefer a stricter formula, that this world is correlated with the functioning of the nervous system. The man left in thus reduces to a nervous system; and that is the truth of the statement, often met with in popular scientific writing, that the brain is the organ of mind. There is no organ of mind; that phrase is an echo of the old-world search after the place of residence of the mannikin-mind, which was assigned variously to heart, liver, eye, brain, blood, or was supposed somehow to perfuse the whole body. The scientific fact is that, whenever we come upon mental phenomena, then we also find a functional nervous system; we know nothing of the former apart from the latter; the two orders are thus correlated.

The fact of this correlation has been established by two principal lines of evidence. In the first place, we find all through the animal kingdom that size of brain and complexity of nervous system are matched by range and complexity of mental phenomena. The brain of man is, by absolute measurement, an organ of great size; it is heavier than that of any other animal with the exception of a few of the very largest (such as the elephant); and in these cases the superior weight is due, not to superior development of the elaborating part of the brain, but to the bulk of the receiving and emitting portions, which are of a size to correspond with the bulk of the body. The brain of man is also relatively, as compared with the weight of the whole body, heavier than the brain of any other animal with the exception of a few of the most highly developed small mammals (such as certain monkeys); and in these cases again the superiority depends on the bulk of the receiving and emitting portions of the brain, which reflect the keen sensitivity and muscular agility of the animal. We know, on the other side, that the mental life of man is richer than that of any other creature. Secondly, we find that disturbance of certain parts of the brain indicates a certain form of mental disturbance; and, conversely, that particular forms of mental disturbance indicate disturbance of particular parts of the brain. One may become blind from injury to the brain as well as from such defect of the eye as prevents optical impressions from reaching the brain.

These are the two lines of evidence. How, though, you may now ask, do we know anything about the distribution of mental phenomena in the animal kingdom? How do we know that the lower animals live in mental worlds? and still more how can we say anything as to the nature of the phenomena that make up those worlds?