The Principles of Psychology Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ...instead. This total effect is lost upon the normal looker-on, bent as he is ou concentration, analysis, and emphasis. What wonder, then, that, under these experimental conditions, the trancesubject excels him in touching the right line again? If he has time given him to count the line, he will excel the trance-subject; but if the time be too short to count, he will best succeed by following the trance-melhci, abstaining from analysis, and being guided by the 'general look' of the line's place on the sheet. One is surprised at one's success in this the moment ono gives up one's habitually analytic state of mind. is it too much to say that we have in this dispersion of the attention and subjection to the 'general effect' something like a relapse into the state of mind of brutes? The trance-subject never gives any other reason for his optical discriminations, save that 'it looks so.' So a man, on a road once traversed inattentively before, takes a certain turn for no reason ex ccpt that he feels as if it must be right. He is guided by a sum of impressions, not one of which is emphatic or distinguished from the rest, not one of which is essential, not one of which is conceived, but all of which together drive him to a conclusion to which nothing but that sum-total leads. Are not some of the wonderful discriminations of animals explicable in the same way? The cow finds her own stanchions in the long stable, the horse stops at the house he has once stopped at in the monotonous street, because no other stanchions, no other house, yield impartially aU the impressions of the previous experience. The man, however, by seeking to make some one impression characteristic and essential, prevents the rest from having their effect. So that, if the (for...