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Page 7
The various fields of consciousness, according to this school, result
from a definite number of perfectly definite elementary mental states,
mechanically associated into a mosaic or chemically combined. According
to some thinkers,--Spencer, for example, or Taine,--these resolve
themselves at last into little elementary psychic particles or atoms of
'mind-stuff,' out of which all the more immediately known mental states
are said to be built up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat
vague form. Simple 'ideas' of sensation and reflection, as he called
them, were for him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built
up. If I ever have to refer to this theory again, I shall refer to it as
the theory of 'ideas.' But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether.
Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural; and,
for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending
conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or
fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.[A]
[A] In the light of some of the expectations that are abroad
concerning the 'new psychology,' it is instructive to read
the unusually candid confession of its founder Wundt, after
his thirty years of laboratory-experience:
"The service which it [the experimental method] can yield
consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or
rather, as I believe, in making this really possible, in any
exact sense. Well, has our experimental self-observation, so
understood, already accomplished aught of importance? No
general answer to this question can be given, because in the
unfinished state of our science, there is, even inside of the
experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted body
of psychologic doctrine....
"In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a
time of uncertain and groping development), the individual
inquirer can only tell for what views and insights he himself
has to thank the newer methods. And if I were asked in what
for me the worth of experimental observation in psychology
has consisted, and still consists, I should say that it has
given me an entirely new idea of the nature and connection of
our inner processes. I learned in the achievements of the
sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental
synthesis.... From my inquiry into time-relations, etc.,... I
attained an insight into the close union of all those psychic
functions usually separated by artificial abstractions and
names, such as ideation, feeling, will; and I saw the
indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its phases, of
the mental life. The chronometric study of
association-processes finally showed me that the notion of
distinct mental 'images' [_reproducirten Vorstellungen_] was
one of those numerous self-deceptions which are no sooner
stamped in a verbal term than they forthwith thrust
non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I
learned to understand an 'idea' as a process no less melting
and fleeting than an act of feeling or of will, and I
comprehended the older doctrine of association of 'ideas' to
be no longer tenable.... Besides all this, experimental
observation yielded much other information about the span of
consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the exact
numerical value of certain psychophysical data, and the like.
But I hold all these more special results to be relatively
insignificant by-products, and by no means the important
thing."--_Philosophische Studien_, x. 121-124. The whole
passage should be read. As I interpret it, it amounts to a
complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the stream of
thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business,
still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping
up 'the mind' into distinct units of composition or function,
numbering these off, and labelling them by technical names.
III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
I wish now to continue the description of the peculiarities of the
stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any intelligible way
assign its _functions_.
It has two functions that are obvious: it leads to knowledge, and it
leads to action.
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