Applied Psychology: Driving Power of Thought Part 1

Applied Psychology: Driving Power of Thought.

by Warren Hilton.

CHAPTER I

JUDICIAL MENTAL OPERATIONS

[Sidenote: _Vitalizing Influence of Certain Ideas_]

One of the greatest discoveries of modern times is the impellent energy of thought.

That every idea in consciousness is energizing and carries with it an impulse to some kind of muscular activity is a comparatively new but well-settled principle of psychology. That this principle could be made to serve practical ends seems never to have occurred to anyone until within the last few years.

[Sidenote: _The Work of Prince, Gerrish, Sidis, Janet, Binet_]

Certain eminent pioneers in therapeutic psychology, such men as Prince, Gerrish, Sidis, Janet, Binet and other physician-scientists, have lately made practical use of the vitalizing influence of certain cla.s.ses of ideas in the healing of disease.

We shall go farther than these men have gone and show you that the impellent energy of ideas is the means to all practical achievement and to all practical success.

Preceding books in this Course have taught that--

I. _All human achievement comes about through some form of bodily activity._

II. _All bodily activity is caused, controlled and directed by the mind._

III. _The mind is the instrument you must employ for the accomplishment of any purpose._

[Sidenote: _The Two Types of Thought_]

You have learned that the fundamental processes of the mind are the Sense-Perceptive Process and the Judicial Process.

So far you have considered only the former--that is to say, sense-impressions and our perception of them. You have learned through an a.n.a.lysis of this process that the environment that prescribes your conduct and defines your career is wholly mental, the product of your own selective attention, and that it is capable of such deliberate molding and adjustment by you as will best promote your interests.

But the mere perception of sense-impressions, though a fundamental part of our mental life, is by no means the whole of it. The mind is also able to look at these perceptions, to a.s.sign them a meaning and to reflect upon them. These operations const.i.tute what are called the Judicial Processes of the Mind.

The Judicial Processes of the Mind are of two kinds, so that, in the last a.n.a.lysis, there are, in addition to sense-perceptions, two, and only two, types of thought.

One of these types of thought is called a Causal Judgment and the other a Cla.s.sifying Judgment.

CHAPTER II

CAUSAL JUDGMENTS

A Causal Judgment interprets and explains sense-perceptions. For instance, the tiny baby's first vague notion that _something_, no knowing what, must have caused the impressions of warmth and whiteness and roundness and smoothness that accompany the arrival of its milk-bottle--this is a causal judgment.

[Sidenote: _Elementary Conclusions_]

The very first conclusion that you form concerning any sensation that reaches you is that something produced it, though you may not be very clear as to just what that something is. The conclusions of the infant mind, for example, along this line must be decidedly vague and indefinite, probably going no further than to determine that the cause is either inside or outside of the body. Even then its judgment may be far from sure.

[Sidenote: _First Effort of the Mind_]

Yet, baby or grown-up, young or old, the first effort of every human mind upon the receipt and perception of a sensation is to find out what produced it. The conclusion as to what did produce any particular sensation is plainly enough a judgment, and since it is a judgment determining the cause of the sensation, it may well be termed a causal judgment.

Causal judgments, taken by themselves, are necessarily very indefinite. They do not go much beyond deciding that each individual sensation has a cause, and is not the result of chance on the one hand nor of spontaneous brain excitement on the other. Taken by themselves, causal judgments are disconnected and all but meaningless.

[Sidenote: _Distorted Eye Pictures_]

I look out of my window at the red-roofed stone schoolhouse across the way, and, _so far as the eye-picture alone is concerned_, all that I get is an impression of a flat, irregularly shaped figure, part white and part red. The image has but two dimensions, length and breadth, being totally lacking in depth or perspective. It is a flat, distorted, irregular outline of two of the four sides of the building.

It is not at all like the big solid masonry structure in which a thousand children are at work. My causal judgments trace this eye-picture to its source, but they do not add the details of distance, perspective, form and size, that distinguish the reality from an architect's front elevation. These causal judgments of visual perceptions must be a.s.sociated and compared with others before a real "idea" of the schoolhouse can come to me.

[Sidenote: _Elements that Make Up an Idea_]

Taken by themselves, then, causal judgments fall far short of giving us that truthful account of the outside world which we feel that our senses can be depended on to convey.

[Sidenote: _Causal Judgments and the Outer World_]

If there were no mental processes other than sense-perceptions and causal judgments, every man's mind would be the useless repository of a vast collection of facts, each literally true, but all without arrangement, a.s.sociation or utility. Our notion of what the outside world is like would be very different from what it is. We would have no concrete "ideas" or conceptions, such as "house," "book," "table,"

and so on. Instead, all our "thinking" would be merely an una.s.sorted jumble of simple, disconnected sense-perceptions.

What, then, is the process that unifies these isolated sense-perceptions and gives us our knowledge of things as concrete wholes?

CHAPTER III

CLa.s.sIFYING JUDGMENTS

[Sidenote: _The Marvel of the Mind_]

A Cla.s.sifying Judgment a.s.sociates and compares present and past sense-perceptions. It is the final process in the production of that marvel of the mind, the "idea."

The simple perception of a sensation unaccompanied by any other mental process is something that never happens to an adult human being.

In the infant's mind the arrival of a sense-impression arouses only a perception, a consciousness of the sense-impression. In the mind of any other person it awakens not only this present consciousness but also the _a.s.sociated_ memories of past experiences.

[Sidenote: _The Indelible Impress_]

Upon the slumbering mind of the newborn babe the very first message from the sense-organs leaves its exquisite but indelible impress. The next sense-perception is but part of a state of consciousness, in which the memory of the first sense-perception is an active factor.

This is a higher type of mental activity. It is a something other and more complex than the mere consciousness of a sensory message and the decision as to its source.

The moment, then, that we get beyond the first crude sense-perception _consciousness consists not of detached sensory images but of "ideas,"

the complex product of present sense-perceptions, past sense-perceptions and the mental processes known to psychology as a.s.sociation and discrimination_.