The Story of the Mind | Page 5

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