The Story of the Mind

by James Mark Baldwin

CHAPTER II.

WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON—INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHOLOGY.

Of all the sources now indicated from which the psychologist may draw, that of so-called Introspective Psychology—the actual reports of what we find going on in our minds from time to time—is the most important. This is true for two great reasons, which make Psychology different from all the other sciences. The first claim which the introspective method has upon us arises from the fact that it is only by it that we can examine the mind directly, and get its events in their purity. Each of us knows himself better than he knows any one else. So this department, in which we deal each with his own consciousness at first hand, is more reliable, if free from error, than any of those spheres in which we examine other persons, so long as we are dealing with the psychology of the individual. The second reason that this method of procedure is most important is found in the fact that all the other departments of psychology—and with them all the other sciences—have to use introspection, after all, to make sure of the results which they get by other methods. For example, the natural scientist, the botanist, let us say, and the physical scientist, the electrician, say, can not observe the plants or the electric sparks without really using his introspection upon what is before him. The light from the plant has to go into his brain and leave a certain effect in his mind, and then he has to use introspection to report what he sees. The astronomer who has bad eyes can not observe the stars well or discover the facts about them, because his introspection in reporting what he sees proceeds on the imperfect and distorted images coming in from his defective eyesight. So a man given to exaggeration, who is not able to report truthfully what he remembers, can not be a good botanist, since this defect in introspection will render his observation of the plants unreliable.

In practice the introspective method has been most important, and the development of psychology has been up to very recently mainly due to its use. As a consequence, there are many general principles of mental action and many laws of mental growth already discovered which should in the first instance engage our attention. They constitute the main framework of the building; and we should master them well before we go on to find the various applications which they have in the other departments of the subject.

The greater results of "Introspective" or, as it is very often called, "General" psychology may be summed up in a few leading principles, which sound more or less abstract and difficult, but which will have many concrete illustrations in the subsequent chapters. The facts of experience, the actual events which we find taking place in our minds, fall naturally into certain great divisions. These are very easily distinguished from one another. The first distinction is covered by the popularly recognised difference between "thought and conduct," or "knowledge and life." On the one hand, the mind is looked at as receiving, taking in, learning; and on the other hand, as acting, willing, doing this or that. Another great distinction contrasts a third mental condition, "feeling," with both of the other two. We say a man has knowledge, but little feeling, head but no heart; or that he knows and feels the right but does not live up to it.

I. On the side of Reception we may first point out the avenues through which our experiences come to us: these are the senses—a great number, not simply the five special senses of which we were taught in our childhood. Besides Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell, and Touch, we now know of certain others very definitely. There are Muscle sensations coming from the moving of our limbs, Organic sensations from the inner vital organs, Heat and Cold sensations which are no doubt distinct from each other, Pain sensations probably having their own physical apparatus, sensations from the Joints, sensations of Pressure, of Equilibrium of the body, and a host of peculiar sensational conditions which, for all we know, may be separate and distinct, or may arise from combinations of some of the others. Such, for example, are the sensations which are felt when a current of electricity is sent through the arm.

All these give the mind its material to work upon; and it gets no material in the first instance from any other source. All the things we know, all our opinions, knowledges, beliefs, are absolutely dependent at the start upon this supply of material from our senses; although, as we shall see, the mind gets a long way from its first subjection to this avalanche of sensations which come constantly pouring in upon it from the external world. Yet this is the essential and capital function of Sensation: to supply the material on which the mind does the work in its subsequent thought and action.

Next comes the process by which the mind holds its material for future use, the process of Memory; and with it the process by which it combines its material together in various useful forms, making up things and persons out of the material which has been received and remembered—called Association of Ideas, Thinking, Reasoning, etc. All these processes used to be considered as separate "faculties" of the soul and as showing the mind doing different things. But that view is now completely given up. Psychology now treats the activity of the mind in a much more simple way. It says: Mind does only one thing; in all these so-called faculties we have the mind doing this one thing only on the different materials which come and go in it. This one thing is the combining, or holding together, of the elements which first come to it as sensations, so that it can act on a group of them as if they were only one and represented only one external thing. Let me illustrate this single and peculiar sort of process as it goes on in the mind.

We may ask how the child apprehends an orange out there on the table before him. It can not be said that the orange goes into the child's mind by any one of its senses. By sight he gets only the colour and shape of the orange, by smell he gets only its odour, by taste its sweetness, and by touch its smoothness, rotundity, etc. Furthermore, by none of these senses does he find out the individuality of the orange, or distinguish it from other things which involve the same or similar sensations—say an apple. It is easy to see that after each of the senses has sent in its report something more is necessary: the combining of them all together in the same place and at the same time, the bringing up of an appropriate name, and with that a sort of relating or distinguishing of this group of sensations from those of the apple. Only then can we say that the knowledge, "here is an orange," has been reached. Now this is the one typical way the mind has of acting, this combining of all the items or groups of items into ever larger and more fruitful combinations. This is called Apperception. The mind, we say, "apperceives" the orange when it is able to treat all the separate sensations together as standing for one thing. And the various circumstances under which the mind does this give the occasions for the different names which the earlier psychology used for marking off different "faculties."