PSYCHOLOGY. 



CHAPTER I. 



THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 



Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its 

 phenomena and of their conditions. The phenomena are 

 such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reason- 

 ings, decisions, and the like ; and, superficially considered, 

 their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic 

 impression on the observer. The most natural and con- 

 sequently the earliest way of unifying the material was, 

 first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondl}^, to 

 affiliate the diverse mental modco thus found, upon a 

 simple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are taken 

 to be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for in- 

 stance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of 

 Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its 

 Appetite. This is the orthodox ' spiritualistic ' theory of 

 scholasticism and of common-sense. Another and a less 

 obvious way of unifying the chaos is to seek common ele- 

 ments in the divers mental facts rather than a common 

 agent behind them, and to explain them constructively^ by 

 the various forms of arrangement of these elements, as one 

 explains houses by stones and bricks. The ' association- 

 ist ' schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hume the 

 Mills and Bain in Britain have thus constructed a, psychology 

 without a soul by taking discrete ' ideas,' faint or vivid, 

 and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms 



