Books like The Principles of Psychology

This is a monster of a book--XXVIII chapters, 897 pages. It was just at the beginning of the attempt to address psychology scientifically, rather than philosophically, though it has a foot in each camp. Published in 1891, it precedes Freud, who however is mentioned in a few places. I am going though it slowly, one chapter at a time, and recording impressions along the way.Ch. V: The Automaton-Theory. This stands up remarkably well. Perhaps that means we've really learned very little new about the mind-problem. James discusses the theory, now common and then already advanced by many of his contemporaries, that conscious, ideas, will, and so forth are mere epiphenomena that have no effect on behavior. These theorists started with the discovery that electricity can make frog legs contract, and the difficulty of seeing any way a mental event could affect a molecule or a cell, and concluded that mental states are epiphenomena of physiologic events. James acknowledges the difficulty of seeing how the mental can affect the physical, but rejects the mechanistic conclusion as not yet proved. He also notes that goal-oriented mental processes would have a clear advantage in natural selection--no mechanism cares where it is going, he says, and a locomotive would not care a wit if it pulled its car over an open drawbridge.Ch VI: The Mind-Stuff Theory. James grapples with the Hard Problem of consciousness: how a biological mechanism, however complicated, can produce consciousness. He spends a great deal of time dealing with the theory, apparently current at the time, that elementary particles have little minds as elementary properties, and these combine to produce a human mind. It sounds ridiculous, but we have to remember that people were desperate for some solution to the Hard Problem (and indeed still are). James does not care for any of the solutions, but somewhat amazingly he comes around to admitting that the traditional religious soul-theory (that a non-material soul inhabits the body and provides the mind in the brain) is the best one available to him.Ch VII: James turns to the methods of psychology. He identifies three: (1) Introspection, the age-old method of philosophers of the mind. Comte had objected that the mind cannot both think and observe itself thinking at the same time, so introspection much be illusionary; James disposes of this by saying we first think, then remember thinking. For myself, I don't see why the mind can't do two things at once--we certainly process sensations and think at the same time. (2) Experimentation, followed by statistical evaluation of the results, which James describes as new and growing and likely to take over the field. How right he was! (3) Comparison with the behavior of animals.Ch VIII: James discusses first the phenomenon of "unconscious thoughts" (the mentally ill--James calls them "hysterics"--sometimes demonstrate some kind of awareness of things they supposedly cannot sense because they are blind or numb; the same is true of some under hypnosis), and then the means by which the mind connects to the brain, and thence to the rest of the body and to the world. On the latter, he confesses that he just doesn't know.Ch IX: The Stream of Thought. James is at pains to refute the idea of Hume and others that thought is a sequence of individual ideas. He says it is a continuous stream, with overlapping ideas constantly coming to be and fading away. Sounds reasonable to me. The method here is totally that of philosophy, i.e. reason and introspection. It makes me want to read a modern text on psychology and see how much of that is done now.Ch X: The Consciousness of Self. This is a long and quite varied chapter. The first part is about what one feels in oneself or belongs to oneself, including the body, material things, and spiritual feelings. This part seems almost like pop psychology. Then James goes into various theories of actual seat or nature of these feelings, the pure self or Ego. These take him deep into discussions with Kant, Hume, and other luminaries, where I can scarcely follow. The three theories he discusses are: (1) Spiritualist, the theory that there is an immaterial substance or soul that is the seat of the Ego--this James says he cannot disprove, but he finds it unilluminating and says that it is scientifically useless because it is untestable; (2) Associationist, which takes the Ego to be just the stream of thoughts sharing common memories and each remembering those past--this is what James favors; and (3) Transcendentalist, Kant's theory, which I will not attempt to summarize because I do not really understand it. The final part of the chapter takes up "The Mutations of the Self," and treats us to various case histories of perplexing multiple personalities, apparent spiritualist possessions, and the like. James marvels at the similarity of the various mediumistic possessions he has witnessed--half of them claim to be departed American Indians, and almost all of them speak of love and harmony, of their current happy afterlife in a sort of summer-land, and describe the ailments of those present. This is true even for people who have not been exposed to spiritualism. These sorts of things were evidently very common in James' era. He says he has no theory to account for them, but "a serious study of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs in psychology." As far as I know, these phenomena have died away without getting that serious study--or else they got that study an evaporated under it.Ch. XI: Attention. A comparatively straightforward chapter. He peremptorily discards the idea of Locke, Hume, and others that our minds are like inert clay on which the senses make impressions. Clearly, he says, when we direct our attention at particular sensations those make a much deeper impression. Then he takes a very scientific turn, relaying the results of various experiments on how attention affects reaction time, complete with average error. Then back to philosophy for the question of whether voluntary attention is the resultant of brain processes, or a force of its own. He says that there is no way science can resolve this questions, and so those who believe either alternative should be left to their opinion in peace.Ch XII: Conception. "The function by which we identify a numerically distinct and permanent subject of discourse." James regards conceptions as unchangeable; our thought takes place by rearranging and relating them. It is the common conception linked to them that makes things seem to be the "same." James has no difficulty with abstract conceptions, or conceptions of universals, unlike some other philosophers. Indeed, he devotes much of the chapter to ridiculing Berkeley, Mills, and other such thinkers. It is remarkable that such towering intellects, all presumably observing the same phenomena, come to such different descriptions of them, and in fact cannot understand how the others could make such mistakes. For these things all we have is introspection, and that is famously unreliable.Ch. XIII: Discrimination and Comparison. A long chapter about how we judge things to be the same or different, about equally divided between arguments from introspection and actual experiments. There is a lot of consideration and impatient dismissal of the ideas of earlier writers.Ch XIV: Association. Only sometimes do we make associations by reason. More often it is by habit, based on experience. In fact neural habit is the one elementary cause of association, but it is made more likely by recency, intensity, and congruence of mood, as well as by simple repetition. Still, there is a lot that is not explained by these and seems to be a matter of chance (in other words, "cerebral causes" that are "too subtle for analysis"). There is also association by similarity, when two ideas have some overlap. But why does the mind follow one overlapping idea and not another? We cannot tell--maybe the cause is in consciousness. (James is refreshingly ready to identify phenomena that he just cannot explain.) In addition to reverie or free association, there is also voluntary thought (to remember something, or to solve a problem), but this works just like free association, with the consciousness rejecting ideas that don't advance the purpose. Citing Hobbes, Hume, and Mill, James traces all mental faculties ultimately to types of association (he also draws examples from Jane Austen's books--he is quite well-read!). Almost all of this chapter is drawn from introspection, but he still talks in the language of an unknown physiology--brain processes that "vibrate" and "discharge."Ch XV: The Perception of Time. What we perceive as "now" must actually be short interval, perhaps a few second, constantly added to at the front and fading away at the back. An actual instantaneous "now" would provide no feeling of before and after. This is our only direct intuition of time. Longer times are conceived of by multiplying this variable short interval. Various experiments give evidence of the shortest perceptible durations, which varies with sense (sight, sound, etc.). We do not sense time itself, only things that happen in time. Thus the passage of time seems sometimes faster than others. Kant's notion of a direct "intuition" of and infinitely extended time is baseless--extended time is derived from intuited short time.Ch XVI: Memory. Memory is not just reoccurrence of an idea--that would be mere repetition--but recall with the additional idea of having had the thought in the past. Memory is attributed to pathways in the brain. Good memory is measured by both the readiness with which those pathways are made and how long they last. More can be remembered by paying closer attention or other self-discipline, but brute capacity for memory is innate and cannot be improved (on inquiry James found that experienced actors had no less labor remembering their lines than when they were younger). The method James uses here is mainly introspection and reason, along with quoting eminent Germans. Towards the end of the chapter he does report a few structured experiments others have made, together with various facts and anecdotes about how forgetting occurs. At the end he returns to philosophy: the impossibility of explaining conscious memory is just a part of that of explaining consciousness in general.Ch. XVIII: Imagination. Largely quotations from other scholars. James is surprised to find that different people form mental images very differently--some visual, some auditory, some in other ways (this is based on interviews and surveys). He seems to be discussing what we call "photographic memory," though he doesn't use the term. James favors the view that mental images are the same thing, using the same mental circuitry, as physical perception, only much weaker. It seems unlikely to me that this can be all that they are. A vivid mental picture can seem much stronger than a weak perception, without any possibility of confusing it with reality.Ch. XIX: The Perception of "Things". The eye can sense only patches of color, but we perceive a solid chair. Clearly the brain does a lot of work to unconsciously turn sensations into perceptions, a skill probably learned in early childhood. Misperceptions lead to illusions, of which many amusing examples are given. Misperception can be triggered by a preconceived idea. Hallucinations.Ch. XX: The Perception of Space. This very long chapter (196 pages) perhaps spends too much time finding philosophical difficulties in how we so easily derive the idea of three-dimensional space from the sparse inputs of sight and touch.Ch. XXI: Belief. Belief is an emotion or psychic attitude, an irreducible aspect of perception of certain ideas held to be real. Everything perceived is believed, unless some other perception contradicts it, in which case a judgment must be made which to admit and which to deny. Modes of reality: (1) The physical as sensed; (2) The ideal physical world of a scientist; (3) Logical, mathematical, ethical, aesthetical reality; (4) Common ideas, e.g. the sun rises and sets; (5) Myth. "Whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real." "The fons et origo of all reality . . . is thus subjective, is ourselves." Nothing is more real than one's sense of one's own existence. Sense objects are either reality or the test of reality. Appearance needs reality in order to exist, but reality needs appearance in order to be known. Touch conveys a more solid and incontrovertible reality than the other senses. We believe in ideas because of the "bodily commotion" they produce. Only the most highly developed man can suspend belief in the presence of an emotionally exciting idea. Philosophic agnosticism is impossible--man needs a belief in purpose for himself, and will invent one if none is given him. Will and belief are two names for the same psychological phenomenon (directed at things we can affect, and at things we cannot).Ch. XXII: Reasoning. This chapter proceeds mostly by philosophical introspection. It is hard to say exactly what reasoning is. It seems to have something to do with one idea succeeding another. Better reasoners have more apt and more essential succeeding ideas. Reasoning requires that only a part of the characteristics of each idea be considered. The inferior reasoning powers of women and of savages are explained.Ch. XXIII: The Production of Movement. This very short chapter serves mainly as an introduction to the next three, on motion by instinct, by emotion, and by volition. The main method here is observation and experimentation. James claims that every feeling produces a movement of the entire organism in all its parts, though the motion in a particular part may be undetectable. This is shown by how people jump when startled, and by some experiments that I was unaware of that show that one's hand strength increased when illuminated by certain colors of light, and by other similar curious observations.*** I have run out of the space that Goodreads allows for reviews. I can hardly blame them, but I am committed to this project I have spent more than five years on. Why, it's hard to say. I will continue the chapter summaries for my own edification.