Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [97]
Functionalism is a handy label, and accurate enough, except that it applies only to some parts of James’s psychology. He had no actual system and deliberately avoided presenting his ideas as a coherent whole because he felt that it was far too early in the development of psychology for an all-embracing grand theory. As Ralph Barton Perry said, James was an explorer, not a mapmaker. In Principles he presented material and theories about every psychological phenomenon from the simplest sensations to reasoning without trying to force everything into a unified framework.
Yet he did have a strong viewpoint. The physiological psychologists of Germany said that mental states were nothing but physiological states of the brain and nervous system; James termed this “an unwarrantable impertinence in the present state of psychology.”23 He viewed mental life as real, and the physiological view that mind was nothing but physical reactions to outside stimuli as unworthy of belief or even debate:
All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which it may cognitively deal. I regard this belief as the most fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology, and shall discard all curious inquiries about its certainty as too metaphysical for the scope of this book.24
The proper subject of psychology was, therefore, the introspective analysis of the “states of mind” that we are conscious of in daily life and of the functions they perform for the organism.
(We will pass by what James had to say about physiological psychology in Principles, since there is little in those chapters that is distinctively Jamesian except for the lucid and often poetic prose.)
The nature of mind: Although James rejected the materialism of physiological psychology, he could not accept the alternative of classic dualism, the theory that mind is a separate entity or substance parallel to and independent of the body. Not only was this wholly unprovable, but Fechner and Donders, among others, had already shown that certain physiological responses to stimuli caused certain states of mind.25
James examined every major solution to the mind-body problem, found fault with each, and finally settled for a dualism of perspective. There are external objects, and our knowledge of those objects; there is a material world, and a set of mind states relating to them.26 The latter are not mere brain states caused by external things; they are mental states that can interact with one another and, within the realm of mind, obey their own causal laws.
Whatever the ultimate nature of mental states, James said, psychologists should lay aside the whole mind-body question. Psychology was in no way ready or able to spell out the connections between physiological states and mental states, and its proper concern, for the present, was the description and explanation of such processes as reasoning, attention, will, imagination, memory, and feelings. From James’s time on, this would be the dominant view within many branches of American psychology—the study of personality and individual differences, educational psychology, abnormal psychology, child development studies, social psychology; everything, indeed, except experimental psychology, much of which would be behaviorist and anti-“mentalist” for many decades.
The stream of thought: Using introspective analysis as the major approach to investigating the conscious mind, James asserted that the reality most immediately perceived by that method is the unbroken flow of complex conscious thought:
Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations. The only thing which psychology