The story of the mind.

  • Baldwin, James Mark, 1861-1934.
Date:
[c.1900]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The story of the mind. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    animals herd, the insects swarm, most creatures live in companies; they are gregarious, and man no less is social in his nature. So there is a psychology of herds, crowds, mobs, etc., all put under the heading of “ Social Psychology.” It asks the question, What new phases of the mind do we find when individuals unite in common action ?—or, on the other hand, when they are artificially separated ? We now have with all this a fairly complete idea of what The Story of the Mind should in- clude, when it is all told. Many men are spending their lives each at one or two of these great questions. But it is only as the results are all brought together in a consistent view of that wonderful thing, the mind, that we may hope to find out all that it is. We must think of it as a growing, developing thing, showing its stages of evolution in the ascending animal scale, and also in the unfolding of the child; as revealing its nature in every change of our daily lives which we experience and tell to one another or find ourselves unable to tell; as allowing itself to be discovered in the laboratory, and as willing to leave the marks of its activity on the scientist’s blackened drum and the dial of the chronoscope; as subject to the limita- tions of health and disease, needing to bo handled with all the resources of the asylum, the reformatory, the jail, as well as with the delicacy needed to rear the sensitive girl or to win the love of the bashful maid; as manifest- ing itself in the development of humanity from the first rude contrivances for the use of fire,