Home · Book Reports · 2019 · The Analysis of Mind
- Author :: Bertrand Russell
- Publication Year :: 1921
- Read Date :: 2019-01-08
- Source :: Russell_Bertrand_- The_analysis_of_mind_(1995_Routledge).pdf
designates my notes. / designates important.
Thoughts
Throughout the entire book we see constant references the academic cells, a term coined by Jan Irvine, Russell was a part of. Primarily there is a constant referring to William James’ work. Additionally there are several references, sometimes in half-hearted opposition, to John Watson’s behaviorism as well as the work of John Dewey. Finally there are one or two mentions of Wundt and Galton.
It is beyond the scope of this review, but these are some of the usual suspects when it comes to clandestine culture creation/manipulation.
The book, general speaking, lays a groundwork for discussing consciousness and the laws that may govern it. It begins with a short jaunt through a materialistic versus idealistic comparison and asking the question of whether there is one or two sets of laws governing the physical and mental worlds.
Interestingly Russell compares this work to building a whole skeleton from finding one fossil of a single bone. Is he making fun of the reader here?
Russell also makes the bold claim that morality is the enemy of science. While it seems true that a lack of morality would lead to faster scientific progress, at what cost would this come? Morality, in my opinion, is like a rudder; without it the individual or society in question is like ship out of control. It is as likely to crash on the rocks as it is to bring you, safely, to new lands.
Language-habit, which I believe is essentially S-R theory, is critiqued, but the alternative offered (a neutral material that which both mind and matter emerge from) is, in my opinion, at least as unpalatable.
To Russell’s credit he minces no words when he calls out Freud and Jung for being popular though unscientific in their treatments of the (un)conscious mystery.
Russell’s argument begins be asserting that man is not much different than a protozoa, physically or mentally.
Taking the view that we can understand ourselves best through introspection, but we can understand animals better through observation, many examples are given that are the same used in the works of Kostler.
Some of these include the cat in cage flailing about to get out to food. By chance it hits a lever that opens the cage. It soon learns to push lever to get out, even though the initial movements are random. There are several references to the ubiquitous mice in mazes experiments as well as the experiments showing baby chicks following not only hens but anything else that moves when they are young. Lastly there is a similar, but not exact, experiment done on the Ammophila wasp and its interaction with its caterpillar prey.
What is most interesting is that Kostler was using these same experiments as evidence throughout his works on creativity during the 1960s and 70s. The Ghost and the Machine, his last such work (I think) was published in 1979. This book was published in 1921.
Moving on, we see that Russell believes that desire, alongside psycho-analysis, is to be determined by observation rather than introspection. This feels quite Watsonian. An example: being hungry you might act to get food, thinking the end result, satiation, is your motive. In reality the prime mover is in fact hunger itself.
Do we believe that birds have the end result of mating in mind when building a nest, sitting on eggs, and feeding the babies? Especially the first time. The impulse comes from behind, the previous action, not from the front, the end result of mating.
This Russell calls a behavior-cycle. These cycles start with discomfort and end with pleasure.
Pleasure and discomfort are compared to pain: pain is akin to heat/cold while discomfort is the opposite of pleasure.
“The state of affairs in which this condition of quiescence is achieved is called the “purpose” of the cycle, and the initial mental occurrence involving discomfort is called a “desire” for the state of affairs that brings quiescence.”
“A desire is called “conscious” when it is accompanied by a true belief as to the state of affairs that will bring quiescence; otherwise it is called “unconscious.” All primitive desire is unconscious, and in human beings beliefs as to the purposes of desires are often mistaken. These mistaken beliefs generate secondary desires, which cause various interesting complications in the psychology of human desire, without fundamentally altering the character which it shares with animal desire.”
When discussing memory, Russel states that:
in attempting to state the proximate cause of the present event, some past event or events must be included, unless we take refuge in hypothetical modifications of brain structure.
our remembering is caused by- (1) The present stimulus, (2) The past occurrence.
Russell continues to look closer at stimulus, memory, recall as well as association and habit, which Russell asserts are basically the same after an experience a new quiescent point is set. His example is: “a burnt child fears fire.”
Contrast this example to dead matter. A stick can go in and out of fire with no experiential change.
Additionally, multiple stimulus together can be associated.
In this portion of the book, there is a clear attack on cause and effect. Bergson and Kant are both mentioned.
It is perhaps worth while to observe that mnemic causation is what led Bergson to deny that there is causation at all in the psychical sphere. He points out, very truly, that the same stimulus, repeated, does not have the same consequences
Before closing the lecture on memory, Russell wonders: do memories reside in the brain? It is necessary that the brain be in a particular state to give rise to a particular memory, but not sufficient, he claims. Do memories alter the physical structure of the brain? He thinks so but admits there is need for more evidence.
Chapter five is noteworthy because the entire chapter attempts to separate physics and psychology. Physics, Russell says, deals with all particulars grouped into a single object while psychology deals with each particular individually.
One example given is photographs taken of a star. Each photograph (one taken from every possible angle) is a particular that might look a certain way whereas all of the pictures taken together represent the object, star, as known to physics.
All in all, I think this is nothing but an early attempt to popularize the disconnect of reality and perception, to promote the primacy of consciousness over the primacy of matter. The chapter actual begins by saying the science has show there is no reason to believe in causation.
Chapter six doubles down on the primacy of consciousness (in a round about way), opening with the following:
ONE of the main purposes of these lectures is to give grounds for the belief that the distinction between mind and matter is not so fundamental as is commonly supposed.
He continues:
I contend that the ultimate constituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations…
To begin with the trustworthiness of introspection. It is common among certain schools to regard the knowledge of our own mental processes as incomparably more certain than our knowledge of the “external” world, this view is to be found in the British philosophy which descends from Hume, and is present, somewhat veiled, in Kant and his followers. There seems no reason whatever to accept this view.
Not only are we often unaware of entertaining a belief or desire which exists in us; we are often actually mistaken.
Even worse than Kant and Hume, Russell says there is a substrate that both mind a matter spring from and that is “often actually mistaken”! How bleak.
He then wraps back around to the star example to define perspective.
The appearance of a star at a certain place, if it is regular, does not require any cause or explanation beyond the existence of the star. Every regular appearance is an actual member of the system which is the star, and its causation is entirely internal to that system. We may express this by saying that a regular appearance is due to the star alone, and is actually part of the star, in the sense in which a man is part of the human race.
“… does not require any cause or explanation beyond the existence…” Again denying causality.
But, when viewing the star through a medium:
When the distorting influence of the medium is sufficiently great, the resulting particular can no longer be regarded as an appearance of an object, but must be treated on its own account.
Ignoring the vagueness of terms like “sufficiently great”, how am I to square this circle?
The appearance of a star at a certain place, if it is regular, does not require any cause or explanation beyond the existence of the star.
And
When the distorting influence of the medium….
How can something influence if all that is required is the existence of a star? Is the medium causing an effect? Why the need to explain this if there “does not require any cause or explanation beyond the existence of the star.”
Maybe I am misunderstanding Russell. Or maybe he is a master sophist.
Next Russell turns again to more discussing of Watson’s theories (though in disagreement), calling upon Galton for support.
Really, Russell’s works read almost like a whos-who of the then oligarchy.
Russell wants to believe that images and sensation can be reduced to the same thing. Does he mean he wants physiology to describe how images are conjured in the mind or does he want the mind to conjure reality? Or does he, falling back to the neutral stuff of both mind and matter, want to understand this aether?
In disagreeing with Watson, it seems, he might want reduction to consciousness. Or he simply wants a more elegant theory than the behaviorists provide. In his other (later) works on science and its potential future impact, it seems Russell favors the behaviorist view.
After a chapter on memory, language is covered. He claims that we think in language. This is not exactly true. In the 1940’s there was a survey of some of the “top minds” requesting how they think. Most said they thought in vague images that they then had to turn into language. Only one, Norbert Weiner, said he thought primarily in words. I found that result most interesting. I would think Weiner, a mathematician, would be more likely a visual/symbolic thinker.
Russell discredits Watson’s training of a child with a box to say “box” even when the box is not present (asking for it). The stimulus was not the box but the desire for a box (a box is followed by an armful of toys that go in it), but the behaviorists deny desire…
Next he asks an age old question: can we think in generals or only particulars? can you imagine “dog”. Not “a dog”, but “dog”?
Russell continues to contend that all thinking is done in words or images. This would be the particular dog, maybe a composite dog, but not the general idea dog.
I tend to agree with Berkeley that you can not imagine a generality, like the perfect form present only in a Platonic heaven.
A prickly lecture on belief follows. Whether through words of images, is belief the default position if a memory is not negated? Imagining a horse, do you believe it is real? What if you imagine in with wings?
This chapter (12) also feels like it is promoting primacy of consciousness to me, but I can’t put my finger on why.
The obligatory chapter on truth and falsehood offers little comment-worthy, except for this:
I do wish to suggest that the feeling of self-evidence in mathematical propositions has to do with the fact that they are concerned with the meanings of symbols, not with properties of the world such as external observation might reveal.
This is most agreeable to me. In out modern world we see, with the rise of such things as theoretical physics, an interchange between the map and the territory. Or should I say the MATH and the territory? People have forgotten, or been lead to believe, that the symbols of mathematics are not the real world and can only describe said real world, however imperfectly. The accuracy of a particular mathematical theory, within the human construction of mathematical language, has little to do with reality. That isn’t to say I am anti-math -far from it- but one must understand that our modern mathematics is likely incorrect, or maybe I should say incomplete, in some way.
Case-in-point: dark matter/energy. While this concepts work in mathematical theory, there is no evidence that they exist.
Nearing the end of the book, Russell succinctly states:
my main thesis, namely that all psychic phenomena are built up out of sensations and images alone.
And, at the very end of the book he revisits the idea that matter is a logical fiction (putting the MATH before the territory), concluding with:
VI. All our data, both in physics and psychology, are subject to psychological causal laws; but physical causal laws, at least in traditional physics, can only be stated in terms of matter, which is both inferred and constructed, never a datum. In this respect psychology is nearer to what actually exists.
Further Reading
Russell’s:
- Authority and the Individual
- Education and the Social Order
- Impact of Science on Society
- Marriage and Morals
- Mysticism and Logic
- On Education
- Power
- Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (published in 1921)
- Principles of Social Reconstruction
- Prospects of Industrial Civilization
- Why I am Not a Christian
Other’s:
- Essays in Radical Empiricism, William James
- Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (D. Appleton and Co., 1916), Cannon
Follow Up Notes
- new school for social research 1933
- shep gordon
- margarette mead
- marlin brando
- constant reference to William James
- Harvard
- Alcoholics Anon
- Lippmann
- Unspun 131@1:37:55)
- directly thanks John Watson
- several mentions of Wundt, Dewey
- mention of Galton
Exceptional Excerpts
Man has developed out of the animals, and there is no serious gap between him and the amœba.
I contend that the ultimate constituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations…
my main thesis, namely that all psychic phenomena are built up out of sensations and images alone.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Preface
- 01: Recent Criticisms of “Consciousness”
- 02: Instinct and Habit
- 03: Desire and Feeling
- 04: Influence of Past History on Present Occurrences in Living Organisms
- 05: Psychological and Physical Causal Laws
- 06: Introspection
- 07: The Definition of Perception
- 08: Sensations and Images
- 09: Memory
- 10: Words and Meaning
- 11: General Ideas and Thoughts
- 12: Belief
- 13: Truth and Falsehood
- 14: Emotions and Will
- 15: Characteristics of Mental Phenomena
- Actual pages numbers.
· Introduction (1994)
page x:
- his eclectic fusion of James’s neutral monism, Watson’s behaviourism, and his own new causal theory of meaning
· Preface
page xix:
-
THIS book has grown out of an attempt to harmonize two different tendencies, one in psychology, the other in physics, with both of which I find myself in sympathy, although at first sight they might seem inconsistent.
-
On the one hand, many psychologists, especially those of the behaviourist school, tend to adopt what is essentially a materialistic position, as a matter of method if not of metaphysics. They make psychology increasingly dependent on physiology and external observation, and tend to think of matter as something much more solid and indubitable than mind. Meanwhile the physicists, especially Einstein and other exponents of the theory of relativity, have been making “matter” less and less material. Their world consists of “events,” from which “matter” is derived by a logical construction.
page xx:
- My thanks are due to Professor John B. Watson and to Dr. T. P. Nunn for reading my MSS at an early stage and helping me with many valuable suggestions
· 01: Recent Criticisms of “Consciousness”
page 2:
- Philosophers, on the other hand, have maintained often that matter is a mere fiction imagined by mind, and sometimes that mind is a mere property of a certain kind of matter. Those who maintain that mind is the reality and matter an evil dream are called “idealists”—a word which has a different meaning in philosophy from that which it bears in ordinary life. Those who argue that matter is the reality and mind a mere property of protoplasm are called “materialists.”
page 11:
- Modern idealism professes to be by no means confined to the present thought or the present thinker in regard to its knowledge; indeed, it contends that the world is so organic, so dove-tailed, that from any one portion the whole can be inferred, as the complete skeleton of an extinct animal can be inferred from one bone.
page 15:
- There are, it seems to me, prima facie different kinds of causal laws, one belonging to physics and the other to psychology. The law of gravitation, for example, is a physical law, while the law of association is a psychological law.
page 16:
- There is a psychological school called “Behaviourists,” of 7 whom the protagonist is Professor John B. Watson7 , formerly of the Johns Hopkins University. To them also, on the whole, belongs Professor John Dewey, who, with James and Dr. Schiller, was one of the three founders of pragmatism. The view of the “behaviourists” is thatnothing can be known except by external observation. They deny altogether that there is a separate source of knowledge called “introspection,” by which we can know things about ourselves which we could never observe in others. They do not by any means deny that all sorts of things may go on in our minds: they only say that such things, if they occur, are not susceptible of scientific observation, and do not therefore concern psychology as a science. Psychology as a science, they say, is only concerned with behaviour, i.e. with what we do; this alone, they contend, can be accurately observed.
page 21:
- moral considerations are the worst enemies of the scientific spirit and we must dismiss them from our minds if we wish to arrive at truth.
page 28:
- Man has developed out of the animals, and there is no serious gap between him and the amœba.
· 02: Instinct and Habit
page 29:
- it is of the greatest importance to remember that from the protozoa to man there is nowhere a very wide gap either in structure or in behaviour. From this fact it is a highly probable inference that there is also nowhere a very wide mental gap.
page 30:
- We can understand ourselves best through introspection, but we can understand animals better through observation.
page 31:
- On the whole, therefore, there is probably more to be learnt about human psychology from animals than about animal psychology from human beings; but this conclusion is one of degree, and must not be pressed beyond a point.
· 03: Desire and Feeling
page 45:
- The whole tendency of psycho-analysis is to trust the outside observer rather than the testimony of introspection. I believe this tendency to be entirely right, but to demand a re-statement of what constitutes desire, exhibiting it as a causal law of our actions, not as something actually existing in our minds.
· 04: Influence of Past History on Present Occurrences in Living Organisms
page 61:
- in attempting to state the proximate cause of the present event, some past event or events must be included, unless we take refuge in hypothetical modifications of brain structure.
page 64:
- our remembering is caused by- (1) The present stimulus, (2) The past occurrence.
page 65:
- The burnt child that fears the fire has “experienced” the fire, whereas a stick that has been thrown on and taken off again has not “experienced” anything, since it offers no more resistance than before to being thrown on. The essence of “experience” is the modification of behaviour produced by what is experienced.
page 66:
- Semon formulates two “mnemic principles.” The first, or “Law of Engraphy,” is as follows: “All simultaneous excitements in an organism form a connected simultaneous excitement-complex, which as such works engraphically, i.e. leaves behind a connected engram-complex, which in so far forms a whole” (Die mnemischen Empfindungen, p. 146). The second mnemic principle, or “Law of Ekphory,” is as follows: “The partial return of the energetic situation which formerly worked engraphically operates ekphorically on a simultaneous engram-complex” (ibid., p. 173).
page 68:
- we can collect all mnemic phenomena in living organisms under a single law, which contains what is hitherto verifiable in Semon’s two laws. This single law is: If a complex stimulus A has caused a complex reaction B in an organism, the occurrence of a part of A on a future occasion tends to cause the whole reaction B.
page 70:
- It is perhaps worth while to observe that mnemic causation is what led Bergson to deny that there is causation at all in the psychical sphere. He points out, very truly, that the same stimulus, repeated, does not have the same consequences
page 71:
- Those who desire to make psychology as far as possible independent of physiology would do well, it seems to me, if they adopted mnemic causation. For my part, however, I have no such desire
page 73:
- I am myself inclined, as a working hypothesis, to adopt the belief in question, and to hold that past experience only affects present behaviour through modifications of physiological structure.
· 05: Psychological and Physical Causal Laws
page 74:
- THE traditional conception of cause and effect is one which modern science shows to be fundamentally erroneous, and requiring to be replaced by a quite different notion, that of laws of change.
· 06: Introspection
page 87:
- ONE of the main purposes of these lectures is to give grounds for the belief that the distinction between mind and matter is not so fundamental as is commonly supposed.
page 88:
-
Your dreams and memories and thoughts, of which you are often conscious, are mental facts, and the process by which you become aware of them seems to be different from sensation. Kant calls it the “inner sense”; some- times it is spoken of as “consciousness of self”; but its commonest name in modern English psychology is “introspection.”
-
I believe that the stuff of our mental life, as opposed to its relations and structure, consists wholly of sensations and images.
page 99:
-
I contend that the ultimate constituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations…
-
To begin with the trustworthiness of introspection. It is common among certain schools to regard the knowledge of our own mental processes as incomparably more certain than our knowledge of the “external” world, this view is to be found in the British philosophy which descends from Hume, and is present, somewhat veiled, in Kant and his followers. There seems no reason whatever to accept this view.
-
Not only are we often unaware of entertaining a belief or desire which exists in us; we are often actually mistaken.
· 07: The Definition of Perception
page 104:
- It might be said that at any moment all sorts of things that are not part of my experience are happening in the world, and that therefore the relation we are seeking to define cannot be merely simultaneity. This, however, would be an error—the sort of error that the theory of relativity avoids. There is not one universal time, except by an elaborate construction; there are only local times, each of which may be taken to be the time within one biography. Accordingly, if I am (say) hearing a sound, the only occurrences that are, in any simple sense, simultaneous with my sensation are events in my private world, i.e. in my biography.
page 110:
- The appearance of a star at a certain place, if it is regular, does not require any cause or explanation beyond the existence of the star. Every regular appearance is an actual member of the system which is the star, and its causation is entirely internal to that system. We may express this by saying that a regular appearance is due to the star alone, and is actually part of the star, in the sense in which a man is part of the human race.
page 111:
-
When the distorting influence of the medium is sufficiently great, the resulting particular can no longer be regarded as an appearance of an object, but must be treated on its own account.
-
How much is ‘sufficiently great’?
· 08: Sensations and Images
page 113:
- THE dualism of mind and matter, if we have been right so far, cannot be allowed as metaphysically valid.
page 116:
-
When you open your newspaper in the morning, the actual sensations of seeing the print form a very minute part of what goes on in you, but they are the starting-point of all the rest, and it is through them that the newspaper is a means of information or mis-information.
-
Interesting that he would specific mis-information.
page 118:
- we may say that the patch of colour and our sensation in seeing it are identical.
page 120:
- The things we see in dreams when our eyes are shut must count as images, yet while we are dreaming they seem like sensations. Hallucinations often begin as persistent images, and only gradually acquire that influence over belief that makes the patient regard them as sensations. When we are listening for a faint sound— the striking of a distant clock, or a horse’s hoofs on the road— we think we hear it many times before we really do, because expectation brings us the image, and we mistake it for sensation. The distinction between images and sensations is, there- fore, by no means always obvious to inspection.3
page 124:
-
(3) This brings us to the third mode of distinguishing images from sensations, namely, by their causes and effects.
-
What happened to ’no causation’?
-
Professor Stout (loc. cit., p. 127) says: “One characteristic mark of what we agree in calling sensation is its mode of production. It is caused by what we call a stimulus. A stimulus is always some condition external to the nervous system itself and operating upon it.” I think that this is the correct view, and that the distinction between images and sensations can only be made by taking account of their causation.
page 126:
- for the present I am only concerned to combat his [Watson’s] denial of images.
page 127:
- Galton, as every one knows, investigated visual imagery, and found that education tends to kill it: the Fellows of the Royal Society turned out to have much less of it than their wives.
page 129:
- I am by no means confident that the distinction between images and sensations is ultimately valid, and I should be glad to be convinced that images can be reduced to sensations of a peculiar kind.
· 09: Memory
page 130:
- I do not myself believe that the analysis of knowledge can be effected entirely by means of purely external observation, such as behaviourists employ.
page 138:
- A gramophone, by the help of suitable records, might relate to us the incidents of its past; and people are not so different from gramophones as they like to believe.
page 148:
- Our understanding of the words “breakfast this morning” is a habit, in spite of the fact that on each fresh day they point to a different occasion. “This morning” does not, whenever it is used, mean the same thing, as “John” or “St. Paul’s” does; it means a different period of time on each different day. It follows that the habit which constitutes our understanding of the words “this morning” is not the habit of associating the words with a fixed object, but the habit of associating them with something having a fixed time-relation to our present. This morning has, to-day, the same time-relation to my present that yesterday morning had yesterday. In order to under- stand the phrase “this morning” it is necessary that we should have a way of feeling time-intervals, and that this feeling should give what is constant in the meaning of the words “this morning.” This appreciation of time-intervals is, however, obviously a product of memory, not a presupposition of it. It will be better, therefore, if we wish to analyse the causation of memory by something not pre-supposing memory, to take some other instance than that of a question about “this morning.”
page 158:
- This analysis of memory is probably extremely faulty, but I do not know how to improve it.
· 10: Words and Meaning
page 159:
- If we trace any Indo-European language back far enough, we arrive hypothetically (at any rate according to some authorities) at the stage when language consisted only of the roots out of which subsequent words have grown. How these roots acquired their meanings is not known, but a conventional origin is clearly just as mythical as the social contract by which Hobbes and Rousseau supposed civil government to have been established.
page 172:
- But when this view is investigated, it is found that it compels us to suppose that the box can be desired without the child’s having either an image of the box or the word “box.” This will require a theory of desire which may be, and I think is, in the main true, but which removes desire from among things that actually occur, and makes itmerely a convenient fiction, like force in mechanics.4
page 177:
-
Almost all higher intellectual activity is a matter of words, to the nearly total exclusion of everything else.
-
Post WW2 there was a study of ‘great’ scientists concerning this; almost every single one said they did NOT think in words, or at least primarily in words. The only outlier was Norbert Weiner. Another example would be Faraday, who visualized lines of force (later expressed mathematically by Maxwell).
· 11: General Ideas and Thoughts
page 212:
- I remain, therefore, entirely unconvinced that there is any such phenomenon as thinking which consists neither of images nor of words, or that “ideas” have to be added to sensations and images as part of the material out of which mental phenomena are built.
· 12: Belief
· 13: Truth and Falsehood
page 224:
- I do wish to suggest that the feeling of self-evidence in mathematical propositions has to do with the fact that they are concerned with the meanings of symbols, not with properties of the world such as external observation might reveal.
· 14: Emotions and Will
page 237:
- my main thesis, namely thatall psychic phenomena are built up out of sensations and images alone.
page 238:
- James–Lange theory. James states this view in the following terms (Psychology, vol. ii, p. 449): “Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions, grief, fear, rage, love, is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion (James’s italics). Common sense says: we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifes- tations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth.”
page 239:
- Rage and fear have been especially studied by Cannon, whose work is of the greatest importance. His results are given in his book, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (D. Appleton and Co., 1916). The most interesting part of Cannon’s book consists in the investigation of the effects produced by secretion of adrenin. Adrenin is a substance secreted into the blood by the adrenal glands. These are among the ductless glands, the functions of which, both in physiology and in connection with the emotions, have only come to be known during recent years. Cannon found that pain, fear and rage occurred in circumstances which affected the supply of adrenin, and that an artificial injection of adrenin could, for example, produce all the symptoms of fear. He studied the effects of adrenin on various parts of the body; he found that it causes the pupils to dilate, hairs to stand erect, bloodvessels to be constricted, and so on.
· 15: Characteristics of Mental Phenomena
page 255:
- Matter, as defined at the end of Lecture V, is a logical fiction, invented because it gives a convenient way of stating causal laws.
page 260:
- I think, however, on grounds of the theory of matter explained in Lectures V and VII, that an ultimate scientific account of what goes on in the world, if it were ascertain- able, would resemble psychology rather than physics in what we found to be the decisive difference between them. I think, that is to say, that such an account would not be con- tent to speak, even formally, as though matter, which is a logical fiction, were the ultimate reality.
page 262:
-
The conclusions at which we have arrived may be summed up as follows:
-
I. Physics and psychology are not distinguished by their material. Mind and matter alike are logical constructions; the particulars out of which they are constructed, or from which they are inferred, have various relations, some of which are studied by physics, others by psychology. Broadly speaking, physics group particulars by their active places, psychology by their passive places.
-
II. The two most essential characteristics of the causal laws which would naturally be called psychological are subjectivity and mnemic causation; these are not unconnected, since the causal unit in mnemic causation is the group of particulars having a given passive place at a given time, and it is by this manner of grouping that subjectivity is defined.
-
III. Habit, memory and thought are all developments of mnemic causation. It is probable, though not certain, that mnemic causation is derivative from ordinary physical causation in nervous (and other) tissue.
-
IV. Consciousness is a complex and far from universal characteristic of mental phenomena.
-
V. Mind is a matter of degree, chiefly exemplified in number and complexity of habits.
-
VI. All our data, both in physics and psychology, are subject to psychological causal laws; but physical causal laws, at least in traditional physics, can only be stated in terms of matter, which is both inferred and constructed, never a datum. In this respect psychology is nearer to what actually exists.