Book Description

(From the [1915, c1914] preface) It can hardly be claimed that a new textbook of psychology is needed because there is lack of old ones. On the contrary, we have a bewildering variety, and America has contributed a large and brilliant share. Yet the plan and aim of the present book are very different from all of them. One difference is indicated even by its sub-title; it includes the applied psychology as well as the general. Hitherto the textbooks have been confined to the theoretical study. The time seems ripe for bringing the psychological work into full contact with the practical efforts of civilization. The application of psychological studies to education and law, to industry and commerce, to health and hygiene, to art and science, deserves its place in the psychological curriculum. Thus the last third of this book may be a supplement to any other textbook. But the book adds to the usual material still another essential part. The psychology of our textbooks is individual psychology; this volume also includes the social psychology. Finally, the traditional psychology is confined to descriptions and explanations. Very justly, such an explanatory account of mental life omits an entirely different aspect, its inner meaning. But this meaning of the acts of our mind offers, after all, problems of its own. They must be solved; we cannot simply ignore them. This book, therefore, traces them in a special part, called Purposive Psychology. Our causal psychology is and must be a psychology without a soul; the purposive psychology culminates in the understanding of the soul and its freedom. While the addition of an applied, a social and a purposive part makes the material of this book very different from the others, its method, too, deviates in many respects from the customary procedure. The book emphasizes the principles, both the biological-physiological and the philosophical. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).