The mind at work : a handbook of applied psychology / edited by Geoffrey Rhodes.

Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mind at work : a handbook of applied psychology / edited by Geoffrey Rhodes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    knowledge and the aesthetic enjoyment of life imagination is essential. Its absence causes narrowness of view, intolerance and cruelty, closing upon us “ the walls of the prison-house.” Thought.—All ideational as compared with perceptual activity involves some degree of generalization. We have pointed out that images are much vaguer, much less determined, than percepts, and it must now be noted that this indeterminateness applies also to the meaning of the image so far as the whole mental process or “ universe of thought ” at the time does not define it. Thus, the image of a house may represent property, or home, or architecture. But there is another side to this “generalizing” process, as the mental activity is called, by which ideas origin- ally attached to particular sense-presentations are separated and acquire a general significance applicable to other and different presentations. For the image is revived in a train of ideas which is under the controlling influence of interest in the construction of an ideal whole. Thus, what is vague and indefinite in the several images considered separately becomes, as the train of thought progresses, clear and fixed by their re- lation to the ideal whole of which they are part. The significance of the image of “house” is fixed for the property owner, the man about to be married, or the architect, by the “universe of