第5章 GENERAL THEORIES OF PSYCHOLOGY(3)

6. Opposed to this method of treatment found in descriptive faculty­psychology, is that of explanatory psychology. When consistently empirical, the latter must base its inter-pretations on certain facts which themselves belong to psychical experience. These facts may, however, be taken from different spheres of psychical activity, and so it comes that explanatory treatment may be further divided into two varieties which correspond respectively to the two factors, objects and subject, which go to make up immediate experience. When the chief emphasis is laid on the objects of immediate experience, intellectualistic psychology .

This type of psychology attempts to derive all psychical processes, especially the subjective feelings, impulses, and volitions, from ideas, or intellectual processes as they may be called on account of their importance for knowledge of the objective world. If, on the contrary, the chief emphasis is laid on the way in which immediate experience arises in the subject, a variety of explanatory psychology results which attributes to those subjective activities referred to external objects, a position as independent as that assigned to ideas. This variety has been called voluntaristic psychology, because of the importance that must be conceded to volitional processes in comparison with other subjective processes.

Of the two varieties of psychology which result from the general attitudes on the question of the nature of inner experience (3), psychology of the inner sense commonly tends towards intellectualism. This is due to the fact that, when the inner sense is coordinated with the outer senses, the contents of psychical experience which first attract consideration are those which are presented as objects to this inner sense in a manner analogous to the presentation of natural objects to the outer senses. It is assumed that the character of objects can be attributed to ideas alone of all the contents of psychical experience, because they are regarded as images of the external objects presented to the outer senses. Ideas are, accordingly, looked upon as the only real objects of the inner sense while all processes not referred to external objects, as, for example, the feelings, are interpreted as obscure ideas, or as ideas related to one's own body, or, finally, as effects arising from combinations of ideas.

The psychology of immediate experience (4), on the other hand, tends toward voluntarism. It is obvious that here, where the chief problem of psychology is held to be the investigation of the subjective rise of all experience, special attention will be devoted to those factors from which natural science abstracts.

7. Intellectualistic psychology has in the course of its development separated into two trends. In one, the logical processes of judgment and reasoning are regarded as the typical forms of all psychoses; in the other, certain combinations of successive memory-images distinguished by their frequency, the so­called associations of ideas, are accepted as such. The logical theory is most clearly related to the popular method of psychological interpretation and is, therefore, the older. It still finds some acceptance, however, even in modern times. The association-theory arose from the philosophical empiricism of the last century. The two theories stand to a certain extent, in antithesis, since the first attempts to reduce the totality of psychical processes to higher, while the latter seeks to reduce it to the lower and, as it is assumed, simpler forms of intellectual activity. Both are one­sided, and not only fail to explain affective processes and volitional processes on the basis of the assumption with which they start, but are not able to give a complete interpretation even of the intellectual processes.

8. The union of psychology of the inner sense with the intellectualistic view has led to a peculiar assumption that has been in many cases fatal to psychological theory. We may define this assumption briefly as the erroneous attribution of the nature of things to ideas, to ideas. Not only was an analogy assumed between the objects of so­called inner sense and those of the outer senses, but former were regarded as the images of the latter; it came that the attributes which natural science ascribes to external objects, were also transferred to the immediate objects of the "inner sense", the ideas. The assumption was made that ideas are themselves things, just as the external objects to which we refer them; that they disappear from consciousness and come back into it; that they may, indeed, be more or less intensely and clearly perceived, according as the inner sense is stimulated through the outer senses or not, and according to the degree of attention concentrated upon them, but that on the they remain unchanged in qualitative character.

9. In all these respects voluntaristic psychology is opposed to intellectualism. While the latter assumes an inner sense and specific objects of inner experience, volunteerism is closely related to the view that inner experience is identical with immediate experience. According to this doctrine, the content psychological experience does not consist of a sum of objects, but of all that which makes up the process of experience in general, that is of all the experiences of the subject in their immediate character, unmodified by abstraction or reflection. It follows of necessity that the contents of psychological experience are here regarded as an interconnection of processes .

This concept of process excludes the attribution of an objective and more or less permanent character to the contents of psychical experience.