Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology - Tapa blanda

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. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... LECTURE XXX § I. Concluding Remarks; The Question Of Immortality. § II. The Principle Of Psychophysical Parallelism. § III. Old And New Phrenology. § IV. The Empirical Significance Of The Principle Of Parallelism. § V. The Nature Of Mind. T the beginning of these lectures upon the mental life of man and the animals we declined to base our considera tions from the outset upon any hard and fast conception of the nature of mind, and to force the facts of experience into agreement with that conception, in the way of the metaphysical psychologists. On the contrary, we regarded it as our primary duty to acquaint ourselves with the facts, and then, without the aid of any other assumptions than those suggested by introspection and supported by experimentation and objective observation, to try and establish laws under which the phenomena of mind might be subsumed. But, now that we have come to the end of our task, it becomes imperative for us to cast a glance over the body of facts that we have collected, and to consider what answer is co be given to the ultimate questions of psychology. The path that we have travelled was not lighted by any metaphysical guiding star. What is the result? Do these questions refuse to be answered? do they transcend the limits of human knowledge? Or has experimental psychology something to say about them, something which may be believed and accepted as the issue of an unprejudiced appeal to experience? There is, indeed, one problem of speculative psychology which we must exclude from the first as insoluble. Not only does it transcend the limits of the empirical doctrine of mind: it does not stand upon the plane of scientific knowledge at all. it is the question of the condition of the mind...