The Mental Highway
	First Steps In Mental Life <  Previous Contents Next  >

Psychology is the science of the mind. It begins with the soul, the ego, and proceeds to distinguish between that which is self and that which is not self. It defines the self as that which thinks, feels and wills. From the beginning, we direct bodily vision outward, and so does the soul move outward, away from itself. We can study mental movements and states by certain records of acts and facts, which the soul leaves.

The body’s eye is set for the vanishing point of vision. The nearer the object of vision, the more pronounced the strain upon the eye. The bodily eye can see itself only by roundabout means, as for instance a mirror. So, too, the mind directs its activities more easily to things away from itself. Mind is concerned with the external objects entering the struggle for existence rather than with studying the method of their perception. We act before we theorize. We adjust the mind to find rest at the farthest distance of thought from itself. Just as mind comes to rest trying to think of space as topless, bottomless and endless, so it finds complete rest in contemplating Infinity.

We take our expressions for mental phenomena from the material world. Thus, we developed language. We represent the inner world of mind by symbols we borrow from the outer world of space. For instance, we call the affectional, emotional side of the mental life the "heart," and speak of emotion as "feeling."

We cannot exactly determine just when we begin to distinguish between the self and the not-self. Some think it is before birth, arguing a dim and hazy sense of consciousness.

The new born child’s cry does not clearly have any element of conscious activity, but we regard it as the first step of conscious life. The second step is that the child notices the light, usually on the second day. The light attracts him if it is not too strong, but if too strong, he tries to hide from it. The child can fix his gaze on what attracts him after the third week. Then he begins to notice sounds, and recognizes his mother as the source of nutrition at two or three months. Until he recognizes his mother, we call the steps of his conscious life "sense-perceptions." Yet that experience brings a series of advanced steps of past sense-perceptions, and this stream of memory-images furnishes material for comparison with the present sense-perception and enables him to recognize them as caused by the same object.

This comparison of his memory-images with sense-perception, leads to a third step of conscious development, for it produces the idea of her as the source of nutrition. From this develops the pleasure in having his stomach filled, and of pain if deprived of her presence too long. As the conscious life develops more rapidly, he discovers that he has hands, and that he can use them to draw things to him or push them away.

Then the personifying faculty becomes active. Often he conceives that his hands or feet are beings apart from him, so that he will offer to share his bread with his foot even after a year. This personifying faculty, coupled with a vivid imagination, makes his world of mental images and ideas a world of reality to him. He lies normally and without moral turpitude. His mind follows his mental images much as a dog chases his tail. For the time being, it is a thing apart from his own personality.

These first steps in the development of conscious life in the child are, in a word, the psychology of humanity. We may sum the life of primitive peoples in the simple elements of the struggle for existence, as eating, drinking, sleeping and reproduction.

Here the personifying faculty is also very active. They dreamed of people, dream-people who were gods of good or evil — mostly the latter, to whom they attributed more strength of character than the dreamers themselves possessed. Darwin records the case of a savage who beheld himself for the first time in a mirror, and remarked: "I see the world’s spirit." To his simple mental processes, it was not a reflection, but a real spiritual thing.

As the child or the primitive human begins to know himself as a rational being, he recognizes other people like him.

He knows that they have minds, feelings, thoughts, and sensations, by analogy with his own. He can formulate certain laws of the mind, and definite relationships between the mind and the body by comparing their experiences with his own. Later he discovers the difference between the conscious and unconscious activities of the mind, and finally formulates the psychological elements, or Cognition, Feeling, and Will.

The study of the mind is difficult because mental states are so changeable, nor can we reproduce exactly any mental state or experience. Even the same object does not always appear the same on any two days, just as a photographer will not take an identical picture on successive days though he uses the same camera and light.

Our mental outlook is constantly changing, and determining the exact reliability of any individual’s observations is difficult. For instance, one person hears a voice when no objective speaker is near. To him it is a voice from the spirit-world. Another will report the same experience as the voice of his inner self. Either may be correct, but both are unreliable, since conveying just what the phenomenon was is difficult, and because the interpretation of it biases the impression. For these reasons, both objective and subjective experiences are often useless as working material in the study of mental operations.

Using the law of relativity, we test our mental states and experiences by those of others, and so prevent one-sidedness due to personal peculiarity. Our natural temperament, our conditions of life, and our special experiences direct the stream of our conscious life. If our experiences vary radically on some given point, we may need help to compare our ideas and experiences with others’, with our other experiences, and with the facts as they are.

One woman had lived for years with the sense of impending disaster, and had been expecting to die for years. Her recovery began with facing the fact that not one of her forebodings had ever happened, and by showing her that humanity’s organized experience is summed up in the words: "I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God." Romans 8:38-39.

The study of mental phenomena calls for us to exercise that faculty of the mind by which we consider a proposition from all sides and form an opinion in harmony with all the facts. It uses not only one’s own experiences but the experiences of others and the current working facts in the case and can forecast the outcome of an adventure or the solution of a problem.