Lanterna Rally

Author: George Ladd

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2015-03-13

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781508859581

...Prof. Ladd gives us a digest of psychological investigations in American and Continental laboratories. His abstract is wrought in such a fashion as to make it thoroughly interesting. The arrangement of subjects and use of block-type for headings is admirable. The book is thoroughly to be recommended to elementary students. It aims at describing and explaining the growth of mental life. Psychology is presented to us as a study of the experiences and doings of a "subject" or "self." The most familiar everyday experiences are its subject-matter, only they are not ordinarily regarded from the point of view of the psychologist. The common, practical, view is objective; here we deal with the subjective side of the same experiences. These mental experiences may be termed generally "consciousness," while we who are conscious of them are the self or mind of which they are the mental experiences. Consciousness and attention are thus first to be considered, and Prof. Ladd's account of the states, or fields, of consciousness is particularly lucid. The varying extent, intensity, speed, character of consciousness in different individuals is one of the most fruitful regions of psychology. The physiological conditions of consciousness and attention are emphasized. Sensations are the modifications of consciousness experienced in the use of the organs of sense. They originate in consciousness, yet are immediately or ultimately excited from without. The relations of sensation and stimulus, as well as the limitations of the Weber-Fechner Law, are clearly stated. The physiology of feeling is propounded as a surplus of nervous energy in the cerebral centres. Prof. Ladd declares emphatically against the reduction of all feeling to "pleasure-pain," although these enter into almost all other feelings. The physiology of mental images and ideas is carefully stated. While certain properties of the brain-substance furnish the physical conditions of memory-images and images of fancy, there is no literal "copy" of any sense-impression; but there is a tendency on the part of the molecules of this substance to re-act in a similar way whenever they are again similarly excited. The treatment of fusion and association of ideas is concise and lucid..... -The Academy, Volume 47 [1895]