Book Description

"The four parts of which this work consists, though intimately related to each other as different views of the same great aggregate of phenomena, are yet, in the main, severally independent and complete in themselves. The General Analysis is an inquiry concerning the basis of our intelligence. Its object is to ascertain the fundamental peculiarity of all modes of consciousness constituting knowledge proper--knowledge of the highest validity. The Special Analysis has for its aim, to resolve each species of cognition into its components. Commencing with the most involved ones, it seeks by successive decompositions to reduce cognitions of every order to those of the simplest kind; and so, finally to make apparent the common nature of all thought, and disclose its ultimate constituents. The General Synthesis, setting out with an abstract statement of the relation subsisting between every living organism and the external world, and arguing that all vital actions whatever, mental and bodily, must be expressible in terms of this relation; proceeds to formulate, in such terms, the successive phases of progressing Life, considered apart from our conventional classifications of them. And the Special Synthesis, after exhibiting that gradual differentiation of the psychical from the physical life which accompanies the evolution of Life in general, goes on to develop, in its application to psychical life in particular, the doctrine which the previous part sets forth: describing the nature and genesis of the different modes of Intelligence, in terms of the relation which obtains between inner and outer phenomena"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).