On a social level, war brings a sense of unity in the face of a collective threat. In his seminal essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910), James suggested that warfare was so prevalent because of its positive psychological effects, both on the individual and on society as a whole. And again, I quickly found that William James had already reached a similar conclusion. This led me to believe that warfare was primarily a psychological phenomenon, rather than one rooted in human biology or evolution. My interest in this topic stemmed from my reading of anthropological and archaeological texts that suggested that warfare only became endemic in fairly recent times (that is, about 6,000 years ago) and that in prehistoric times, group conflict was surprisingly uncommon. In The Principles of Psychology, he described how children’s slowed sense of time was due to the fact that, “in youth, we have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day… but as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”Īnother area that has always interested me is the psychology of warfare. I thought I had come up with something new but soon found that William James had put forward a similar theory. I suggested that one of the reasons why time seems to speed up as we get older is because the world becomes gradually more familiar to us, and so we process fewer new impressions. I argued that time seems to go slowly for children because the world is so new to them, and so they are processing much more perceptual information. In Making Time, I put forward an "information processing" theory of time, suggesting that the more information our minds process (that is, the more perceptions, sensations, thoughts and so on) the slower time seems to pass. One of the first books I wrote was about the perception of time. These may mutually eat each other up to all eternity.In all my years of writing and lecturing about psychology, there is a phenomenon I’ve grown accustomed to: Whenever I come up with a "new" idea or theory, I eventually find that there is one psychologist who has addressed the topic before me: William James.Īlthough he is well recognized as one of the founding fathers of psychology, the range and the timeless relevance of William James’ writings and theories never cease to amaze me. The spinal cord, that feeling though latent must still be there to make it act The hemispheres, and finding their performances apparently guided by feeling concludes, when he comes to The rationality of their performances can owe nothing to the feelings that Has no consciousness, and passing up to the hemispheres of man concludes that Ideas themselves, and it becomes hard indeed for a Humian to say how the notion of causalityĪrgumentum ad hominem which need not detainĬonsequence of the extension of the notion of reflex action to the higherĪ decapitated frog which performs rational-seeming acts although probably it Strip the string of necessity from between Thought to sprout out of its customary antecedent. Illegitimate outward projection of the inward necessity by which we feel each Seem to find between the terms of a physical chain of events, is an That doctrine asserts that the causality we Huxley have openly expressed their belief in Hume's doctrine of causality. That this latter part of the theory should be held by writers, who like Prof. Severally correspond awaken each other in that order. Order without mutual cohesion, because the nerve-processes to which they The feelings are merely juxtaposed in that Maintains that we are in error to suppose that our thoughts awaken each otherīy inward congruity or rational necessity, that disappointed hopes cause sadness, Is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it Unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the Feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, The theory maintains that inĮverything outward we are pure material machines. Lecture on "Body and Mind" but which found itsĮarliest and ablest exposition in Mr. Clifford fulminated as a dogma essential to salvation in a Spalding punctiliously made the pivot of all his book-notices in Nature Huxley gave such publicity in his Belfast address which the late Henry Quastler Adolphe Quételet Pasco Rakic Nicolas Rashevsky Lord Rayleigh Jürgen Renn Giacomo Rizzolati Emil Roduner Juan Roederer Jerome Rothstein David Ruelle Tilman Sauerīiosemiotics Free Will Mental Causation James SymposiumĪcquainted with the Conscious-Automaton-theory to which Prof.
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