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The Soul and its Mechanism - Introduction
Thus Western psychology emphasizes the physical and seen and, in its chosen field, is scientific. It is constitutionally opposed to the idle and dreaming speculations of the visionary mystic. The result of its efforts has been to isolate a body of facts which do effectively embody the truth about man, his behavior and equipment. This knowledge should be invaluable in producing a better mechanism through which a finer race can function. Western psychology, in its more extreme schools, is actively deterministic for it relates all feeling, thinking and activity to the functioning of the physical cells and the bodily organs. Free Will is therefore largely ruled out in favor of the organism, the nervous apparatus, and of the endocrine system. The following quotations bear this out. "Watson in his 'Psychology from the standpoint of a Behaviorist,' would teach that 'emotion is an heredity pattern-reaction involving profound changes of the bodily mechanism as a whole, but particularly of the visceral and glandular systems" (p. 195); and that 'thought is the action of language mechanisms' (page 316); is 'highly integrated bodily activity and nothing more' (p. 325) ; and that 'when we study implicit bodily processes we are studying thought.' By this Watson does not mean to identify thought with the correlated cortical activity of the brain - not at all; [21] but with all the bodily processes that are involved, implicitly and explicitly, in the production of spoken, written and sign language - the muscular activity of the vocal apparatus, diaphragm, hands, fingers, eye-movements, etc. (p. 324). - Prince, Morton, Psychologies of 1925, p. 208. "Psychology studies the world with man left in it, i.e., it studies experience as dependent upon the nervous system, whereas physics studies experience as though existing independently of the nervous system. Psychology should, therefore, be classified with the general sciences as a discipline laying bare the general traits of mind, where mind is defined as 'the sumtotal of human experience considered as dependent upon a nervous system.' ... Psychology studies the total environment viewed as existing only at the moment when it affects the (human) nervous system, whereas physics studies the total environment viewed as existing beyond the moment when it affects the (human) nervous system. - Hunter, Walter S., Psychologies of 1925, p. 95. "Thirdly, the faith of the mechanist implies two assumptions which we must carefully distinguish; for one of them may be false, though the other be true. These two assumptions are (1) that all processes in the world are fundamentally of one kind only (2) that all these processes are of the kind commonly assumed by the physical sciences in their interpretations of inorganic nature; namely mechanistic, or strictly determined, and therefore strictly predictable, events." - McDougall, William, Psychologies of 1925, p. 303.
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