SECTION J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 



CURRENT CONSTRUCTIVE THEORIES 

 IN PSYCHOLOGY 



ADDRESS BY 



PROF. BEATRICE EDGELL, D.Litt., 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



I. 



On August 29 there occurred the tercentenary of one who is often called 

 ' the father of English psychology,' John Locke, 163 2-1 704. 



His Essay concerning Human Understanding is primarily a theory of 

 knowledge, not a system of psychology, but none the less there is much 

 of psychological interest in the Essay, and it has had a profound influence 

 on empirical psychology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 



We may regard it as a misfortune that what he described as a ' historical 

 plain method ' should have been interpreted as a genetic study, and that 

 his doctrine of simple and complex ideas should have been translated into 

 a doctrine of psychological elements and compounds ; but such has been 

 the case. Historians trace a straight line of descent from the Essay of 

 Locke to the Analysis of the Phenome7ia of the Human Mind by James 

 Mill, and thus claim Locke as a founder of the Association school. 



It may seem a far cry from 1632 to 1932, but I want to consider some 

 of the differing constructive theories of learning and knowledge offered 

 by the psychologists of to-day in the light of the unreconciled methods 

 and principles which find expression in the Essay. 



We find first and foremost in the Essay a confusion of logical and 

 psychological analysis ; secondly, we find a theory that attributes the union 

 of discrete ideas to their accidental association in time, introduced as an 

 afterthought to the theory that ideas are united by the perception of their 

 connection or repugnancy. 



To begin with the confusion of logical with psychological analysis. 

 As Prof. Gibson has pointed out in his book Locke's Theory of Know- 

 ledge, at the time at which Locke was writing the distinction between 

 the elements of knowledge attainable by logical analysis and the simple 

 beginnings of knowledge attainable by genetic study was a distinc- 

 tion which it was well-nigh impossible for a writer to draw. Growth 

 and development were conceptions which had a very different colouring 

 from what they have for us to-day. They were, moreover, conceptions 

 which had no literal application to knowledge. Knowledge for Locke 

 was a structure whose validity could be tested by taking it to pieces. 

 Just as a logical analysis of the ultimate items into which, say, a building 



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