Outlines of Psychology, with Special Reference to the Theory of Education (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Need of Brain Rest. It follows from these truths that in order to maintain brain efficiency we must supply the necessary conditions of repose and alternation of activity. After a certain amount of work the brain should be allowed to repose as a whole. An approximate condition of repose is reached by play, which by calling forth the muscles into easy and familiar modes of activity relieves the higher centres of attention and thought. Within these limits of extreme and general fatigue of the brain, efficiency can only be secured by varying the kind of work so as not to tax any one region of the brain overmuch. A change from manual to vocal exercise in the Kinder-garten may be taken as an illustration of this rule. Relation of Psychology to other Sciences. Psychology is a positive science dealing with a certain class of phenomena, and to this extent is on a level, or co-ordinate, with the special physical sciences, as chemistry, botany, and so on. Not only so, owing to the connection between nervous and mental processes, psychology enters, as we have seen, into a peculiar relation with physiology. On the other hand, psychology is above, and complementary to, the special sciences. For in considering mind, it views knowing as a mental phenomenon, as an operation or process in our mental life. Thus all knowing, whether of chemistry, botany, or physiology, inasmuch as it is the activity of some mind or knowing subject, is a part of the subject-matter of psychology. In other words, mental science considers what goes on in the miud when we know. On the other hand, it does PLACE OF PSYCHOLOGY AMONG BCIENCES . 15 not enquire into the truth or falsity of this knowing. It simply views the process of knowing on its subjective side, and leaves the consideration of knowledge on its ob...