The Postulates of a Structural Psychology
Philosophical Review
The Postulates of a Structural Psychology Author(s): E. B. Titchener Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 7, No. 5 (Sep., 1898), pp. 449-465 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2177110 . Accessed: 09/10/2013 12:56
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Volume VIL. September, i898. Whole Number 5. Number 4u.
THE
PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
THE POSTULATES OF A STRUCTURAL PSYCHOLOGY.’
IOLOGY, defined in its widest sense as the science of life and 1J of living things, falls into three parts, or may be approached from any one of three points of view. We may enquire into the structure of an organism, without regard to function,-by analysis determining its component parts, and by synthesis exhibiting the mode of its formation from the parts. Or we may enquire into the function of the various structures which our analysis has re- vealed, and into the manner of their interrelation as functional organs. Or, again, we may enquire into the changes of form
IAt the Ithaca meeting of the American Psychological Association, December, i897, Professor Caldwell read a paper (printed in the Psychological Review of July, i898) upon the view of the psychological self sketched in my Outline of Psychol- ogy. The present article contains a part of my reply to the criticism of Professor Caldwell; a full answer would require a definition of science and a discussion of the relation of science to philosophy. J hope to publish, later on, a second article, dealing with these topics. Since Professor Caldwell is really attacking, not an individual psy- chologist, but a general psychological position, the discussion of the questions raised by him can take an objective form. A polemic is always more telling if it be directed against an individual, and Professor Caldwell doubtless recognized this fact when he selected my book as whipping-boy. But a rejoinder in kind would, I think, be dreary reading, while the issues involved are serious enough to justify a broader treat- ment.
As I shall not return to the point, I may note here that a few of Professor Cald- well’s objections rest upon technical errors. This is true at least of nos. i, 8, and 9 of his twelve arguments. Such lapses are hardly to be avoided by any one who travels out of his own special field into that of another discipline; they do not at all impair the value of Professor Caldwell’s contentions regarded as a whole.
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450 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [VOL. VII.
and function that accompany the persistence of the organism in time, the phenomena of growth and of decay. Biology, the science of living things, comprises the three mutually interdepen- dent sciences of morphology, physiology, and ontogeny.
This account is, however, incomplete. The life which forms the subject matter of science is not merely the life of an indi- vidual; it is species life, collective life, as well. Corresponding to morphology, we have taxonomy or systematic zoology, the science of classification. The whole world of living things is here the organism, and species and sub-species and races are its parts. Corresponding to physiology, we have that department of biology-it has been termed I cecology ‘-which deals with ques- tions of geographical distribution, of the function of species in the general economy of nature. Corresponding to ontogeny we have the science of phylogeny (in Cope’s sense): the biology of evolution, with its problems of descent and of transmission.
We may accept this scheme as a ‘working’ classification of the biological sciences. It is indifferent, for my present purpose, whether or not the classification is exhaustive, as it is indifferent whether the reader regards psychology as a subdivision of bi- ology or as a separate province of knowledge. The point which I wish now to make is this: that, employing the same principle of division, we can represent modern psychology as the exact counterpart of modern biology. There are three ways of ap- proaching the one, as there are the three ways of approaching the other; and the subject matter in every case may be individual or general. A little consideration will make this clear.1
i. We find a parallel to morphology in a very large portion of ‘ experimental’ psychology. The primary aim of the experi- mental psychologist has been to analyze the structure of mind; to ravel out the elemental processes from the tangle of con- sciousness, or (if we may change the metaphor) to isolate the constituents in the given conscious formation. His task is a vivi- section, but a vivisection which shall yield structural, not func- tional results. He tries to discover, first of all, what is there and in what quantity, not what it is there for. Indeed, this work
1 The comparison has been drawn, in part, by Professor Ebbinghaus. See his Grundziige der Psychologie, I, pp. i6i if.
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No. 5.] POS TULA TES OF PSYCHOLOGY 451
of analysis bulks so largely in the literature of experimental psy- chology that a recent writer has questioned the right of the science to its adjective, declaring that an experiment is some- thing more than a measurement made by the help of delicate instruments.’ And there can be no doubt that much of the criticism passed upon the new psychology depends on the critic’s failure to recognize its morphological character. We are often told that our treatment of feeling and emotion, of reasoning, of the self is inadequate; that the experimental method is valuable for the investigation of sensation and idea, but can carry us no farther. The answer is that the results gained by dissection of the ‘ higher’ processes will always be disappointing to those who have not themselves adopted the dissector’s standpoint. Proto- plasm consists, we are told, of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen; but this statement would prove exceedingly disap- pointing to one who had thought to be informed of the phe- nomena of contractility and metabolism, respiration and repro- duction. Taken in its appropriate context, the jejuneness of certain chapters in mental anatomy, implying, as it does, the fewness of the mental elements, is a fact of extreme importance.
2. There is, however, a functional psychology, over and above this psychology of structure. We may regard mind, on the one hand, as a complex of processes, shaped and moulded under the conditions of the physical organism. We may regard it, on the other hand, as the collective name for a system of functions of the psychophysical organism. The two points of view are not seldom confused. The phrase ‘association of ideas,’ e. g., may denote either the structural complex, the associated sensation group, or the functional process of recognition and recall, the associating of formation to formation. In the former sense it is morphological material, in the latter it belongs to what I must name (the phrase will not be misunderstood) a physiological psy-
chology.2
1G. Wol, in Zeits. f Psych. u. Physiol. d. Sinnesorgane, XV, p. I (August, i897) –
2An article by Professor Dewey, entitled ” The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychol- ogy,” Psychological Review, July, i896, seems to contain this idea of a functional psychology: cf pp. 358, 364 f., 370. The article is especially valuable in that it
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452 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [VOL. VII
Just as experimental psychology is to a large extent concerned with problems of structure, so is ‘ descriptive’ psychology, ancient and modern, chiefly occupied with problems of function. Memory, recognition, imagination, conception, judgment, atten- tion, apperception, volition, and a host of verbal nouns, wider or narrower in denotation, connote, in the discussions of descriptive psychology, functions of the total organism. That their under- lying processes are psychical in character is, so to speak, an accident; for all practical purposes they stand upon the same level as digestion and locomotion, secretion and excretion. The organism remembers, wills, judges, recognizes, etc., and is as- sisted in its life-struggle by remembering and willing. Such functions are, however, rightly included in mental science, inas- much as they constitute, in sum, the actual, working mind of the individual man. They are not functions of the body, but func- tions of the organism, and they may-nay, they must-be ex- amined by the methods and under the regulative principles of a mental ‘physiology.’…
