Critical and Experimental Studies in Psychology

Excerpt from Critical and Experimental Studies in Psychology: From the University of Illinois The older, active or dynamic view of the soul has not, in spite Of the scientific trend of our own generation, been given up. All sorts of extra-psychological sanctions - philosophical, biological, medical, - have sustained it. With these latter sanctions we are not here concerned. But psychology itself has found, and it continues to find, reasons for conceiving mind as a power or force, as an agent which originates, directs and controls. These reasons are many and varied; nothing less than a history of modern psychology could expound and inter pret them. Our own study is much less ambitious. It proposes to examine a few outstanding accounts of mind which have been substantially based upon dynamical principles. These accounts represent many schools and various traditions, and they sustain unlike interests in the facts and laws of mind. By dynamical we mean that they consider mind under the category of activity: that they rep-resent mind as being or possessing a central force or power which is causally related to other forms of existence and to physical events. Our examination of these chosen systems has made it appear that the dynamical elements in recent psychology are of at least four kinds; i.a., mind is regarded as a creator, an initiator, a selector and repressor, and an organizer. Possibly these forms of activity differ only in degree and in Shading, and some writers pass easily in their expo'sitions from one of them to another; but they seem to represent logical differences as well as differences in point of view and perspective which have not been carefully defined. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.