Principles of Psychology - Analytical Arguments of The Principles

Analytical Arguments of The Principles

There were five chief targets of the critical/analytical arguments of the volume: innatism (typified by Immanuel Kant); associationism (by Jeremy Bentham); materialism (by Herbert Spencer); spiritualism (by scholastic theology); and metaphysical idealism (by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel).

The perception of time was a very hotly contested field in the psychology of James' day, and gave him an opportunity to explain the difficulty with innatism, which posits time as an infinite necessary continuum. This is a view that leads to unnecessary paradoxes and defies experience. What we experience, rather, are immediate memories and expectations, in a "specious present" of a few second's duration, and all longer spans of time are extrapolations from that.

But just as innatism gives the mind too much credit for time and space, associationism gives it too little credit for art and creativity in general. It treats ideas as bumping into each other and forming broader patterns, even in the end novels and architectural blueprints, in much the same way that atoms bump into one another to form molecules. In this way, it bans the fact of intellectual power.

In James' day, the salient effort to give a thoroughly materialistic account of mind was that of Herbert Spencer. James demonstrates the great confusion inherent in this account. On the one hand, Spencer denied that material facts can ever give rise to feelings, in statements that would seem to commit him to dualism. "Can the oscillations of a molecule," Spencer asked rhetorically, "be represented side by side with a nervous shock, and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate them."

But then Spencer proceeded to attempt to assimilate the two. Later, looking back on his discussion of the point, Spencer wrote how "in tracing up the increase we found ourselves passing without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life." The way in which Spencer got from the former declaration to the latter involved what James called the mind-dust theory, and the self-compounding of mental facts, reducible to (and subject to the same objections as) associationism.

Scholasticism is "popular philosophy made systematic." In psychology, it is the theory that mental events are to be attributed to a special intangible substance known as the soul. James conceded that it might be accurate, but said that "it is at all events needless for expressing the actual and subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear." The phenomena can be expressed more economically with the "supposition of a stream of thoughts" each cognitive of its precursors and claiming them as its own.