You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author of this little book makes the forceful declaration that the psychology of today presents a confused, and therefore a not particularly edifying spectacle. Detailed researches without any connection between them, the object of which is obscure, incompatible theses and methods tried and discarded, are innumerable. The treatise of Watson and that of Segond confronts one with two radically different sciences, and no relationship can be discovered between the immediate data of perception as Bergson understood them and the measurement of the periphery of the usual field or of muscular resistance. This general disorder is due to the error of those who, believing themselves able to consider psychology as a natural science, used the results of physics and chemistry to reduce mental life, with all that we think and experience, into terms of mechanics. This was the mistake of Ribot and his school in France, although traces of the false trend date farther back in the history of philosophical ideas. The doctrine of psychic elements has taken divers incarnations but all return in that which Jules Lagneau has called “le chosisme,” which attempts to explain by false material interpretation that which is in itself inner emotion and spiritual life.
The philosopher admits the existence of elements in the spirit, elements of ideal form, but impersonal and fixed. Our knowledge is formed of an ensemble of images, memories, schemes, and words (representations), as well as of impersonal elements, the combination of which constitutes all of mental life. According to the sensualists, sensation is the primary element, and mental life is merely the continuation of combinations and transformations of this impersonal element.
The author then says that those who at first united on a scientific psychology (the English associationists and German physiologists) in the middle of the 19th century, attempted to repress the notion of an impersonal element and accentuated all of its faults. J. St