Principles of Psychology Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Principles of Psychology is a monumental text in the history of psychology, written by William James and published in 1890.There were four methods in James' psychology: analysis (i.e. the logical criticism of precursor and contemporary views of the mind), introspection (i.e. the psychologist's study of his own states of mind), experiment (e.g. in hypnosis or neurology), and comparison (the use of statistical means to distinguish norms from anamolies).
There were five chief targets of the critical/analytical arguments of the volume: innatism (typified by Immanuel Kant); associationism (by Jeremy Bentham; materialism (by Herbert Spencer); spiritualism (by scholastic theology); and metaphysical idealism (by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel).
The perception of time was a very hotly contested field in the psychology of James' day, and gave him an opportunity to explain the difficulty with innatism, which posits time as an infinite necessary continuum. This is a view that leads to unnecessary paradoxes and defies experience. What we experience, rather, are immediate memories and expectations, in a "specious present" of a few second's duration, and all longer spans of time are extrapolations from that.
But just as innatism gives the mind too much credit for time and space, associationism gives it too little credit for art and creativity in general. It treats ideas as bumping into each other and forming broader patterns, even in the end novels and architectural blueprints, in much the same way that atoms bump into one another to form molecules. In this way, it bans the fact of intellectual power.
Spencer's materialism attempted to avoid both faults, giving both experience and ...
Introspection, James wrote, is "difficult and fallible." But it isn't uniquely so -- the difficulties involved are those of "all observation of whatever kind." Still, subject to the checks of the other three methods for psychology, and subject to the "final consensus of our farther knowledge about the thing in question," reports of one's own feelings may be brought to the table.
It was in endeavoring to make use of this method that James coined the phrase stream of consciousness, which was to have a big future with literary critics. He held on introspective grounds that our consciousness is always changing, but it makes no leaps.
The opening of Principles, after introductory material is out of the way, presents what was known at the time of writing about the localization of functions in the brain -- how each sense seemed to have a neural center to which it made report, and how varied bodily motions have their sources in still other centers.
The particular hypotheses and observations on which James relies are of course very much dated. But the broadest conclusion to which his material leads is still valid: that the functions of the "lower centers" (beneath the cerebrum) become increasingly specialized as one moves from reptiles, through ever more intelligent mammals, to humans, while the functions of the cerebrum itself become increasingly flexible, less localized or specialized, as one moves along the same continuum.
James discusses experiments on illusions too (optical, auditory, etc.) and offers a physiological explanation for many, that "the brain reacts by paths which previous experiences have worn, and makes us usually perceive the probable thing, i.e. the thing by which on previous occasions the reaction was most frequently aroused."
Illusions, then, are a special case of the phenomenon of habit.The Analytical Arguments of The Principles
James' Qualified Defense of Introspection
Nineteenth Century Experimental Results