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Authors: Morton Hunt
The Story of Psychology (29 page)
He admitted that introspection is difficult and prone to error. Who could be sure of the exact order of feelings when they were excessively rapid? Of the comparative strengths of feelings when they were very much alike? Or which is longer when both occupied but an instant of time? Who could enumerate all the ingredients of such a complicated feeling as anger?
But he said that the validity of some kinds of introspective reports could be tested and verified by at least half a dozen kinds of well-established experimentation. The duration of simple mental processes, for one, could be estimated introspectively and then verified by reaction-time experiments; the introspective report of how many digits or letters one could simultaneously keep in mind, for another, could be verified by apperception experiments.
And while introspective reports of the more complex and subtle mental states might be impossible to verify experimentally, James maintained that since those acts are introspectively observable, any straightforward account of them can be regarded as literal. In any event, “introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.”
18
One other source of James’s psychological ideas—possibly the most important of all—was personal and nonscientific: his naturalistic, perceptive, and wise interpretation of human behavior, based on his own experience and understanding. Many of his major insights came from “psychologizing,” says the distinguished psychologist Ernest Hilgard in his authoritative
Psychology in America:
To “psychologize” is to reflect on ordinary observations and then to offer a plausible interpretation of the relevant experience and behavior. Once expressed, such interpretations are often so plausible that detailed proof would seem irrelevant—or at least too tedious to be worth the effort. Shakespeare was such a “psychologizer” without making any pretense of being a psychologist. Among psychologists, James is the preeminent psychologizer. The consequence is that he encouraged a full-bodied, warm-hearted psychology that is impatient with the trivial—a robust and vital psychology facing courageously psychology’s most puzzling problems.
19
After twelve years of research, introspection, psychologizing, and writing, James completed
Principles
, which had been an almost intolerable burden to him. It was a huge work—nearly fourteen hundred pages in two volumes—and unsuitable for textbook use after all. Within two years, however, he turned out an abridged textbook version. (The full-length version became known as “James” and the abridged version as “Jimmy.”)
Principles
was an immediate and resounding success, and had a lasting effect on the development of American psychology. Nearly sixty years later Ralph Barton Perry, professor of philosophy at Harvard, would say of it, “No work in psychology has met with such an enthusiastic reception… nor has any other work enjoyed such enduring popularity.”
20
By 1892, when James completed Jimmy, he had been teaching and writing about psychology for seventeen years, and grown weary of it. From then on he turned his creative efforts toward other things: education (he lectured on the applications of psychology in the classroom and published
Talks to Teachers
in 1899); the practical results of different kinds of religious experience (
The Varieties of Religious Experience
appeared in 1902); and philosophy (
Pragmatism
, published in 1907, established him as a leading American thinker).
He did, however, continue to write popular treatments of some of the ideas he had advanced in
Principles
and to keep up with psychological developments. In 1894 he was the first American to call attention to the work of the then obscure Viennese physician Sigmund Freud, and in 1909, though ailing, he went to Clark University to meet Freud on his only visit to the United States and to hear him speak.
Ever the nonconformist, James was willing to explore forms of psychology outside accepted scientific bounds. He took a keen interest in spiritualism and “psychical” phenomena, considering them an extension of abnormal psychology; closely followed the efforts of psychical researchers; attended séances; and in 1884 founded the American Society for Psychical Research. He once made a pact with a dying friend to sit outside his room after his death and wait for a communication from the Beyond; none came. James coupled an open-minded attitude toward such subjects with an insistence on solid scientific evidence; late in life he concluded, “I find myself believing that there is ‘something in’ these never ending reports of psychical phenomena, although I haven’t yet the least positive notion of the something… Theoretically, I am no further than I was at the beginning.”
21
From 1898 on, James had a personal reason to be interested in the
afterlife. That year, at fifty-six, he overtaxed his heart while climbing in the Adirondacks, and thereafter had chronic heart trouble. His health gradually worsened; he resigned from Harvard in 1907, wrote two of his most important works of philosophy in the next three years, and died in 1910, at sixty-eight. John Dewey said of him at that time, “By common consent he was far and away the greatest of American psychologists. Were it not for the unreasoned admiration of men and things German, there would be no question, I think, that he was the greatest psychologist of his time in any country—perhaps of any time.”
22
James had something to say about every topic within psychology, as known in his day, but his chief influence was due to the following handful of his concepts:
Functionalism:
This is the label usually applied to Jamesian psychology. Unlike the New Psychologists, who maintained that higher mental processes are assembled in each individual from simple elements, James held that the higher processes were developed over the ages by evolution because of their adaptive value. He was seventeen when Darwin’s
Origin of Species
appeared (1859), twenty-nine when
The Descent of Man
was published (1871), and was impressed by both. It seemed clear to him that the mind’s complex processes had evolved because of their life-preserving functions, and that to understand those processes one had to ask what functions they perform.
Functionalism is a handy label, and accurate enough, except that it applies only to some parts of James’s psychology. He had no actual system and deliberately avoided presenting his ideas as a coherent whole because he felt that it was far too early in the development of psychology for an all-embracing grand theory. As Ralph Barton Perry said, James was an explorer, not a mapmaker. In
Principles
he presented material and theories about every psychological phenomenon from the simplest sensations to reasoning without trying to force everything into a unified framework.
Yet he did have a strong viewpoint. The physiological psychologists of Germany said that mental states were nothing but physiological states of the brain and nervous system; James termed this “an unwarrantable impertinence in the present state of psychology.”
23
He viewed mental
life as real, and the physiological view that mind was nothing but physical reactions to outside stimuli as unworthy of belief or even debate:
All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which it may cognitively deal.
I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology
, and shall discard all curious inquiries about its certainty as too metaphysical for the scope of this book.
24
The proper subject of psychology was, therefore, the introspective analysis of the “states of mind” that we are conscious of in daily life and of the functions they perform for the organism.
(We will pass by what James had to say about physiological psychology in
Principles
, since there is little in those chapters that is distinctively Jamesian except for the lucid and often poetic prose.)
The nature of mind:
Although James rejected the materialism of physiological psychology, he could not accept the alternative of classic dualism, the theory that mind is a separate entity or substance parallel to and independent of the body. Not only was this wholly unprovable, but Fechner and Donders, among others, had already shown that certain physiological responses to stimuli caused certain states of mind.
25
James examined every major solution to the mind-body problem, found fault with each, and finally settled for a dualism of perspective. There are external objects, and our knowledge of those objects; there is a material world, and a set of mind states relating to them.
26
The latter are not mere brain states caused by external things; they are
mental
states that can interact with one another and, within the realm of mind, obey their own causal laws.
Whatever the ultimate nature of mental states, James said, psychologists should lay aside the whole mind-body question. Psychology was in no way ready or able to spell out the connections between physiological states and mental states, and its proper concern, for the present, was the description and explanation of such processes as reasoning, attention, will, imagination, memory, and feelings. From James’s time on, this would be the dominant view within many branches of American psychology—the study of personality and individual differences, educational psychology, abnormal psychology, child development studies, social psychology; everything, indeed, except experimental psychology,
much of which would be behaviorist and anti-“mentalist” for many decades.
The stream of thought:
Using introspective analysis as the major approach to investigating the conscious mind, James asserted that the reality most immediately perceived by that method is the unbroken flow of complex conscious thought:
Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations. The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact of thinking itself.
The first fact for us, then, as psychologists is that thinking of some sort goes on.
I use the word thinking for every form of consciousness indiscriminately. If we could say in English “it thinks,” as we say “it rains” or “it blows,” we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that
thought goes on.
27
James considered consciousness not a
thing
but a process or
function.
Just as breathing is what the lungs do, conducting conscious mental life is what the brain does. Why does it? “For the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”
28
Consciousness allows the organism to consider past, present, and future states of affairs, and, with the predictive power thus achieved, to plan ahead and adapt its behavior to the circumstances.
29
Consciousness is “a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all.”
30
The chief one is survival; that is its function.
On further introspection, we notice that consciousness has certain characteristics. Of the five James named, the most interesting—because it contradicted traditional Aristotelian conceptions of thinking—is that each person’s consciousness is a continuum, not a series of linked experiences or thoughts:
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described.
In talking of it
hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.
31
While the objects of our thoughts or perceptions may seem distinct and separate, our consciousness of them is itself a continuous flow; they are like things floating in a stream.
The concept of the stream of thought (or, as it is better known, the stream of consciousness) struck a responsive chord among psychologists and became useful and important in both research and clinical work. It also was immediately taken up by a number of authors who sought to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, among them Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. (Stein actually studied under James at Harvard.)
The self:
Even breaks in consciousness, such as those occurring in sleep, do not interrupt the continuity of the stream; when we awaken, we have no difficulty making the connection with our own stream of consciousness, with who we were and are. But that is because of another major characteristic of consciousness: its
personal
nature. Thoughts are not merely thoughts; they are
my
thoughts or
your
thoughts. There is a personal self that separates one’s consciousness from that of others and that knows, from moment to moment and day to day, that I am the same I who I was a moment ago, a day, decade, or lifetime ago.
32
From the beginnings of psychology, thinkers had struggled with the problem of who or what knows that I am I and that my experiences have all happened to the same Me. What substance or entity, what watcher or monitor, accounts for the sense of selfhood and of continuous identity? James called this “the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal.”
33
The classic answer was the soul or transcendental self. But a century earlier both Hume and Kant had shown that we can have no empirical knowledge of such a self.
34
Philosophers might still speculate about it, but psychologists could not observe or study it. Accordingly, the experimental psychologists of the nineteenth century did not even discuss the self, and the British associationists sloughed it off as no more than the connected chain of passing thoughts.