So much for the practical limitations of psychology. In discussing the theoretical aspects of psychology and attempting to point out its limitations I have had to touch on problems ultra-psychological, but this was unavoidable. It had to be done in order to clear the path and see the lay of the land. I have no doubt that there will be found a great number of shortcomings in the foundations as well as vagueness in the delineation of the main postulates and psychological principles. I shall be fully satisfied, if this volume will stimulate others to better work in the same direction.
The second part of this work deals with my theory of "moment-consciousness." This theory was advanced by me some sixteen years ago in my "Psychology of Suggestion." It was further touched upon in my "Multiple Personality," but I had not stated the theory as distinctly as I did in this volume. I may add that when James read the theory in "The Psychology of Suggestion" he told me he found it valuable, and urged me to develop it more in detail.
The theory of moment-consciousness presents a general view of the nature and development of consciousness, from reflex consciousness to compound reflex and instinctive consciousness reaching the highest form of consciousness, that of self-consciousness. Consciousness and the adaptation of the psychic individuality or of the organism to the external environment is looked at not only from a psychological, but also from a biological standpoint. Consciousness in the course of its development is presented in a series of stages and types, each lower stage leading to the next higher and more complicated stage and type. This does not mean that the higher type is included in the lower We must assume spontaneous mental variations, or psychic mutations, so that while the stages and types are arranged in a progressive series of their development and complication, they at the same time differ qualitatively in type of mental life.
I may add that most of the ideas developed in this volume have been formulated by me some fourteen years ago, and then retouched from time to time. A few of the chapters with some modifications have been published by me in various psychological and medical journals.
Boris Sidis
Sidis Psychotherapeutic Institute Portsmouth, New Hampshire, January, 1914
I Psychology as a Science
We assume that the reader regards psychology as a science. It is however one thing to label a subject as a science and another thing to understand clearly in what sense the term science is used in the case of psychology. A clear understanding of the nature of science is here of special importance on account of the peculiar position psychology occupies in the hierarchy of human knowledge. It is therefore desirable to define the meaning of science before we proceed to discuss the subject matter of psychology.
Science is the description of phenomena and the formulation of their relations. Science describes facts and formulates their relations in laws. The task of science is first to formulate facts belonging to the same type, and then to generalize them, that is to express their general relationship by one comprehensive formula, in spite of the many individual variations in the phenomena. Thus in geometry, possibly the most ancient of all sciences, many isolated and important facts were already known to the semi-civilized nations of antiquity, but it required the rationalizing spirit of the Greek mind to classify and generalize the facts into theorems, the laws of space. Many important properties of the right-angled triangle, for instance, were already known to the ancient Chaldeans and Egyptians. They knew that if in a right-angled triangle the two sides are respectively three and four, the hypotenuse must be five and so on; that is, they knew only concrete facts, but what they lacked was just the scientific side. It required a Pythagoras to discover that in all right-angled triangles the sum of the squares of the two sides is equal to the square of the third. No matter what the size of the triangle be, no matter how different in length its sides are, once the triangle be of the same type, namely right-angular, the same general relationship must obtain.
To take an illustration from physics. Falling bodies form one type of movement. Now the bodies themselves may be different in kind, in nature, may be of various material, may differ widely in structure, weight, and shape, and still, since they all belong to the same type of motion, they are, in spite of their manifold diversity, expressed in one general formula, in one law, namely, that the spaces traversed are proportional to the square of times.
In other less exact sciences the facts are exhaustively described and a general statement is formulated as to their relationship. In physiology, for instance, we find mainly descriptions of facts classified into types, the relationships of which are expressed in general formulae, or laws. Thus in the cerebro-spinal nervous system, each part and its functions are described as fully as possible, and then all the facts are brought under one comprehensive formula such as the reflex arc. In embryology the different changes of the embryo are minutely described, classified into types, into a certain number of definite stages, and then all the changes, in the infinite wealth of their variety, are expressed in the general proposition that the embryo in the short period of its development traverses in an abbreviated form all the stages that the species has passed through in the many ages of its existence; all the changes are generalized in the formula that the ontogenetic series is an epitome of phylogenetic evolution. We may, therefore, say that science is a description of types of facts, the relationships of which are expressed in general comprehensive formulae, or laws. It is in this sense that we understand psychology to be a science; it classifies phenomena into types and searches for the general expression of their relations, or for what is termed psychological laws.
We must come to something more precise and definite. We said that psychology deals with classification and generalizations of phenomena; but what are these phenomena? In the different branches of science, we find that each one has a determinate order of phenomena to deal with, a definite subject matter. Thus geometry deals with spatial facts, mechanics with motion, physics with changes of molecular aggregations, chemistry with atomic combinations and their mutations, physiology with processes going to make the equilibrium of organic life, sociology with phenomena of social life, and so it is in the case of all other sciences. Now what is the subject matter of psychology? What are the facts, the phenomena with which psychology deals? Psychology deals with facts of consciousness.
On the very threshold of our discussion, we may be stopped by the pertinent question: "You say that psychology deals with facts of consciousness, but what is consciousness?" Consciousness is subjective facts, such as the elements of sensation, feelings, pains, thoughts, acts of willing and the like. Positive science must have given facts, data to work upon; these data it analyzes, describes, classifies into types and seeks to find the formulae of their relationships. Psychology can accomplish no more than any other science. The data of psychology are facts of consciousness, these facts are analyzed into their simplest elements, and the laws of their relations are searched for. But psychology does not, and legitimately cannot possibly go beyond consciousness. Consciousness is the ultimate datum which psychology must assume as given and which is from a psychological standpoint unanalyzable. Consciousness must be postulated, if we wish to enter the temple of psychology.
In this relation psychology is as positive as the rest of her sister sciences. Geometry, a science to which no one will deny exactness, deals as we know with the laws of space-relations. Should we ask the geometrician the same question just put to the psychologist: You say that your science, geometry, deals with facts of space and their relations, but what is space? The geometrician will smile at us. He will tell us that by space he means such forms as lines, angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, circles, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, etc. Should we persist and ask further, "Yes, that is true, but all these are so many forms of space, what is the space itself with which you deal?" The geometrician will no doubt answer: "My dear sir, geometry deals with facts of space, space itself is taken as an ultimate datum.