Spencer, Herbert

The Principles of Psychology (1855) (Thoemmes Press - Classics in Psychology)

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Broad, deep, brilliant
A masterful challenge to contemporary cognitive science
A road not taken
The Bible
Most wide ranging book about human psychology

The Principles of Psychology (1855) (Thoemmes Press - Classics in Psychology)
Herbert Spencer
Manufacturer: Thoemmes Continuum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1855066556

Book Description

Emphasizing concepts of adaptation, continuity, and development, Spencer attempted to found psychology on principles of evolutionary biology. In so doing he laid the groundwork for scientific functionalism, developmentalism, and the sensorimotor theory of cortical localization.

Customer Reviews:

Broad, deep, brilliant.......2007-04-29

This 1400-page work in two volumes, published in 1890, is probably the best single survey of psychology ever written.

The work is of imposing size, but James covers such a wide field, so thoroughly and so engagingly, that to my own surprise I read both volumes cover to cover, back to back. The two volumes comprise 28 chapters, including "The Functions of the Brain", "Habit", "The Stream of Thought", "Attention", "Association", "Memory", "Imagination", "The Perception of Reality", "Reasoning", and "Will"--to name just a few that I found the most fascinating.

James's reasoning is sharp and subtle, his writing clear and vigorous. The qualities of his own mind, which come through in the prose, are astonishing: he is both skeptical and open-minded, deeply versed in the existing literature, and an original and fearless thinker. He must have been a fantastic prof.

I was a little afraid that the age of the book would make it antique, with fusty 19th-century notions that have long since been disproved. Not a bit! With few exceptions, the material is as fresh and relevant today as it was in 1890. Even the material on brain physiology and function, an area where the 20th century can claim to have made some progress, was sharp, perceptive, and interesting.

The advent of Freud, Pavlov, and others in the 20th century seemed to push certain theoretical ideas about the mind to the forefront, putting other, older ideas in the shade. My prejudice was that they had made 19th-century psychology irrelevant. I was wrong. There were many able minds studying psychology long before Freud, and their findings and views are well worth knowing. Among other things, James's book is a treasure-trove of psychological thinking up to the time of his writing, including many extracts by other researchers, both those he admires and those he is critical or dismissive of.

James, of course, was not merely a psychologist; he was also a philosopher. If I had to give a single reason why I think this book is excellent, it would be that James fearlessly tackles questions lying at the boundary of what today are seen as distinct disciplines. Here you'll find penetrating, persuasive insights into the nature of reasoning, logic, and the will, as well as the origin of aesthetic and moral ideas. James is as thoroughly versed in the works and ideas of Kant, Hume, Berkeley, Locke, and Mill as he is in those of his fellow psychologists. He confronts the thinking of the greatest minds with complete confidence, using his laserlike intellect to discover their obscurities and contradictions. He is their peer.

At the same time, James is humane and folksy in his style, often making references to his own experience, domestic life, and the little experiments he often performed on himself or his students. He writes with candor, humanity, and honesty. Time and again he comes to conclusions or makes observations that cut to the core of human experience altogether.

Technically this is a textbook surveying psychology, probably for a first-year introductory course. It bears almost no resemblance to the dry, cautious tomes that usually fill that role. It is an impassioned work by a learned, deep, and original mind explaining his own conclusions on this vast and elusive topic, based on long study, experiment, and careful thought. It is one of a kind. If you're interested in the human mind, this book is for you.

A masterful challenge to contemporary cognitive science.......2004-06-16

This book is a beautiful classic. James is unafraid to tackle the perplexing questions about consciousness. He is also unencumbered by simplistic theoretical assumptions or restrictive definitions of science, but he holds to a high standard of clarity and steers for the truth.

This book is a brilliant catalogue of the phenomena that must be explained by the various brain and psychological sciences. While the behaviorist movement that came after James led to important advances in scientific method, in terms of objectively establishing empirical results, it also led to a massive denial of mental phenomena that cannot at present be explained purely in mechanical or behaviorial terms. Because subsequent generations have denied the phenomena, or written them off as "illusions" or "folk psychology," as is still common today, this book is a precious trove of unbiased insights about the mind.

I would thus agree with the other reviewers that this is a great book. However, while they seem to claim James for functionalism, (which is I think the dominant framework for understanding mind in contemporary cognitive science--holding that implementing certain functions such as self-representation and planning, are what makes a system conscious, no matter what it's made out of) I suggest that much of James' critique of what he calls the "mind-stuff theory" and the "associationists" is equally devastating to what is now called functionalism. For example, people still talk about patterns of brain actvity as if they had objective, ontological reality. But we can completely describe the brain at the level of molecules without reference to patterns, so the pattern is not an intrinsic, necessary way of interpreting the activity of the physical brain system. Similarly, having the idea of A and the idea of B does not imply having the idea of A+B. James makes this basic point in multiple ways in his book. It seems more or less equivalent to the point articulated in recent times by John Searle, that "any physical process you might find is computational only relative to some interpretation," ie some observer (in "The Mystery of Consciousness" p.16). When expressed in Searle's modern language, it is more clear why the distinction between real objective properties of a system and its extrinsic observer-dependent properties, is a big problem for contemporary functionalism.

In any case, I highly recommend this book to any serious student of psychology. It's not for boneing up for psych exams or grant proposals, but for patiently ruminating on and savoring.

A road not taken.......2003-01-15

Why would anyone want to read a book about psychology that was first published 113 years
ago? One answer is the rationale for reading any psychology book: that it
provides insights into psychological issues not available elsewhere. Although
many psychologists of the late 19th and early 20th century probably started their career by
reading this book, it is not appropriate today as an introduction to psychology. Too
many of James's viewpoints are antiquated, and his facts, outdated or incorrect. Neither
is it the book to read if you are looking for contemporary psychological views
or a compilation of psychological knowledge. Recent textbooks are better for these purposes.
Yet, the word most frequently used to describe James's Principles of Psychology
is probably 'monumental' and rightly so because not only is this a lengthy work (~1400pgs),
but it also is the culmination of a long line of philosophical thinking about the Soul,
Self, Mind, Matter, and related topics that began with the pre-Socratic Greeks
and continued through the 19th century, when positivist philosophers and experimentalists
began to explore psychologically relevant philosophical questions in more concrete terms,
invoking a scientific method and rejecting metaphysics. At the end of the 19th century, a
seeming riot of discussion about the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, mind,
ego, evolution, and related subjects dominated the scientific and popular culture.

At this point in history, William James, an American trained as a physician and employed
as a Harvard professor, examines the various philosophies of the previous two millenia, picking
out those aspects relevant to psychology, comparing and sorting them to reveal their value
as unambiguous theories that might be tested by research, and reflecting on how the evidence
stacks up in their favor. He also advances his own, original conceptions on various issues.
His work is not the first to collect speculation and evidence into a coherent
psychology, and there are many previous works with "Psychology" in their titles,
but James's efforts would galvanize an American discipline of psychological science that
would eventually become a dominant intellectual force.

James defines psychology as the "Science of Mental Life" and describes the
stream of consciousness as "the ultimate fact for psychology." Out of his viewpoint,
the school of functionalism in psychology developed, where the mind is conceived as a
useful organ that evolves according to natural selection and grows according
to discoverable rules. His orientation towards physiological and behavioral data
eventually diminished the then dominant psychological
method of introspection that James himself uses so frequently with great effect.
Subsequent viewpoints in psychology, such as behaviorism, though taking part of their
inspiration from functionalism, reject James's definition of psychology, so that
by the end of the 20th century, most psychologists with an empirical orientation may
call themselves "behavioral scientists," but certainly not "mental scientists."

Reading this book can be disconcerting, perhaps because of his period style or
Victorian sensibilities, or the frequent, unglossed short quotes and phrases in German, French,
and Latin because he assumes the reader has at least these minimal language skills.
Perhaps also, it is because James is not only conversant with the giants of philosophy
and experimental technique who preceeded him, but seemingly, with virtually every
published sentence to date bearing on the subjects of concern, and in veritable fractal detail,
producing a tour de force in erudition. His is not the style of current psychology
journals and textbooks, but fortunately he does translate into English many long passages
he quotes from their original sources. Yet possibly the most disconcerting aspects
are the subjects that James raises in this book.

The new mainstream psychology after James rejects many topics as unsuitable - even for
discussion - that figure prominently in the intellectual history of philosophy
and psychology. James's view that the concept of Soul should be eliminated in
scientific works is one point on which later psychologists heartily agree, but they
also, to a large extent, throw out other concepts of central concern to James, such as
mind, emotion, will, and feeling. Rare pleas by scholars
with varying backgrounds (e.g., Ornstein, Tomkins) urge students of psychology to
revisit issues discussed by James and address the larger questions contained therein, but
such exhorations echo mostly in halls of learning emptied by Vita enhancement pressures.
Renewal of interest reappears lately for some of the suppressed topics, cast into such areas as
cognitive psychology or emotion theory, but James's idea that the mind is a core
concept remains foreign to virtually all contemporary psychologists, and much of his
emphasis seems uncomfortable from today's viewpoint.

The reluctance among psychologists to embrace such philosophical and scientific issues
concerning the mind is remarkably not shared by some physicists, mathematicians,
biologists, computer scientists, and other scientists who in recent works have implied
that psychologists may be irrelevant to elucidating such issues, if not muddle-headed,
scientific dwarfs. This twist is ironic because psychologists restrict their
vocabulary and investigations partly to ape their conception of these "hard-core" sciences.
It is not clear whether psychology will survive the choices that psychologists have
made about their subject matter, or whether psychology departments will inevitably be
diced and parsed into their appropriate slots in departments of computer science, biology,
medicine, statistics, and physics, but certainly, the end of psychology is nearer if
tomorrow's students of psychology fail to study James's Principles of Psychology.

James's work is the jumping off point for much of what forms 20th century psychology:
habit, association, attention, memory, imagination, object and space perception, etc.
His thoughts about emotion, feelings, the self, consciousness, and other topics remain important
for today's theoretical views. On the other hand, this work predates psychoanalysis
and does not include an organized account of abnormal psychology, human communication,
and other topics raised in most elementary surveys of psychology. The context in which
James puts scientific psychology is probably the most important lesson of this book.
The Dover edition is unabridged, the only form of this work that should be
considered by the serious reader.

The Bible.......2002-04-26

James has been rightly credited as the father of Psychology, and this was the work that launched psychology into a field of its own. When it came out some 100 years ago, The Principles was criticized as "un-systematic." James would have taken this as a compliment. It is exactly because this book is not an elaborately contrived system that it remains fresh as a morning flower. Full of details and insight, it is perhaps the most epic and insightful psychological work every produced. That said, The Principles doesn't quite stay within the bounds of psychology. As you will see from the citations (which are voluminous), James was also well read in the humanities, from abstruse philosophy to literary fiction. But then, James was living in a time when Philosophy and Psychology were not distinct disciplines. Not a problem if you enjoy philosophizing. For its breadth, scope and penetrating insights, this book might never grow stale.

Most wide ranging book about human psychology.......1999-06-09

This is probably the most wide ranging and best book ever written about human psychology. Even though it is more than 100 years old, it still gives the best description of the width and range of human thinking and activities.

Roughly speaking, there are two main areas in psychology:

1. The clinical psychology, psychoanalysis and treatment. That area was to a large part shaped by Freud.

2. The cognitive psychology which describes how we think and experience the world. That area was founded by William James, and this book is his main work

Book Description

This long-awaited second edition of a landmark volume, unmatched in breadth and scholarship, has been completely updated and reorganized. The authors provide a scientific and clinical foundation in the introductory chapters, followed by an overview of the biological basis of neurotoxicity which frames the scope of human and veterinary neurotoxic disease. The subsequent chapters detail the properties, actions, and mechanisms of synthetic and natural experimental agents, therapeutic and recreational drugs, and other chemicals with neurotoxic potential: environmental pollutants, workplace contaminants, personal-use products, food additives, and agents harbored by plants, animals and humans. The evidence for the degree of each chemical's neurotoxic effects on a humans, animals and laboratory models is summarized and cross-referenced in appendices and in the index. This new edition establishes neurotoxicology as a scientific discipline that melds neurobiology, toxicology, and neurology. From this unique perspective, the book examines in an encyclopedic manner several hundred chemicals with the capacity to induce neurological illness in humans and animals. Experimental and Clinical Neurotoxicology provides an authoritative reference work indispensable for the neuroscientist and toxicologist, and practitioners of human and animal medicine,

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quality was extremely good.......2006-03-09

The book was recieved in almost perfect condition. Would definitely buy from them again.

A most authoritative book.......2001-07-07

As a practicing clinician and a researcher, I had frequently consulted the first edition of Experimental and Clinical Neurotoxicology since its publication in 1980, and I am glad that a new edition has now become available because considerable advances have been made in this field over the past 20 years. Glancing through the pages of the new edition, I note that the editors have kept up the high standard of the earlier work. The text has been thoroughly revised and updated, and new subjects added. I have no doubt that it will continue to be a most authoritative book in neurotoxicology.

Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget

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Beyond the obviously true
Getting it Right in Hindsight.
Getting it wrong form the beginning

Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget
Kieran Egan
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 030010510X

Book Description

The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the nineteenth century were wrong. And despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues one of the most original and highly regarded educational theorists of our time in Getting It Wrong from the Beginning. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted and why this dooms our attempts at educational reform.

Egan traces the nineteenth-century sources of Progressive thinking about education and their persistence even now. He diagnoses the problem with our schools in a radically different way, and likewise prescribes novel alternatives to present educational practice. His book is both persuasive and full of promise—a book that belongs on the must-read list for anyone who cares about the success of our schools.

Customer Reviews:

Beyond the obviously true.......2007-06-21

Can't agree with the reviewer below about the dry hard-going style of the book - in fact it must be one of the most engaging academic works I've read. Took me less than a day, which is highly unusual, since too often I have hard times maintaining a critical level of concentration just to stay awake reading (dead-) "serious literature". But it doesn't have to be like that - not with reading (yes, even academic, mind you) books, nor with listening to educators, the latter being more to the point of the book. I just found it not a trivial matter that when someone is writing about the flaws of both "traditional" and "progressivist" education which thwart their attempts to engage children's minds and imagination - then he himself be able to avoid the same mistakes he critisizes. And Egan goes far beyond this. He's a great story-teller, and he has a great story to tell - about the "permanent revolution" in education that has been going on forever, but succeeded very little, and the likely reasons for this. Of course education - it's like the youth - has been spoilt since Plato, if not the upper Neolithicum. So beware - you might not be the first one to seek a cure, and you definitely wouldn't be an exception if the cure you devised - (back to the) more natural types of learning! just let the child follow her natural course of delevopment and be a support! just take off from where the child is currently situated in terms of "stages"! just let her learn how to learn (think)... any number of cliches you can come up with - would turn in results more drasically defective than the problems you began with. The point Egan makes is that these proposed progressivist solutions that he so engagingly follows from Spencer through Dewey and Piaget (for the latter two of whom I have great respect for, by the way, if a little less enthusiastic after reading this book.) to our days - are too obvious on the one hand, almost truistic, and beg the question whether what is (under a certain set of socio-cultural condiotions) "natural" to one is "natural" to another, who's the biggest expert in these questions, and no less - what is the kind of life that is most worth leading. All education comes back to these questions - how do we devise being human, and thus its becoming through education. Studies in cognitive psychology and neuroscience of learning etc. are of modest help if we're not philosophically positioned in what is unavoidably a philosophical problem. So Egan doesn't try to strike us with his "latest research findings" as to the deepseated nature of children's thinking at this or that stage and respective cognitive capacities (constraints), which have often had the appalling tendency to overlook what children CAN do (perhaps much better than adults!) in favor of what they can't (a la Piaget, a too unilinear progress that doesn't admit the losses that occur along the developmental path) anyway - but envisages his own "merely subjective and speculative" (or "not merely objective", it might be more appropriate to say in educational theory) approach to teaching as story-telling. A form of education that would incorporate motives that are quite universally "attractive" (not to say "natural" :) and important to people, make creative and intelligent use of structures present in myths and fairy-tales that that seldom fail to capture the listener. (The author himself definitely knows how to do it.)

I think with this move Egan really brings us closer to the center of problems facing us when trying to understand and improve the situation of our current educational practices. A vastly important and very accessible work.

Getting it Right in Hindsight. .......2005-02-21

This is an outstanding title for a book and I could not wait for it to arrive in the mail. The author proves to be quite witty and authoritative regarding the history of education and the way in which it has been influenced, and in turn dominated, by the progressives. His recapitulation of the career of the Herbert Spencer was quite insightful but no where is Egan stronger than in the chapter that discusses the impact that progressivism has had on the study of history and all other forms of knowledge that are not directly useful to the real world (such as Latin).

Many of his observations about progressive education are worth highlighting, but the reason I could not give "Getting it Wrong from the Beginning" a higher rating is that I did not find the book to be particularly readable. It is a dry slog that takes longer than one would expect based on its less than 200 pages. Had he included more examples from our modern public schools I would have found it more useful as a reference work. Egan's put considerable thought into his positions though so the book is definitely worth a serious skim.

Getting it wrong form the beginning.......2003-08-21

It has been a long time since I read a book that both frustrated me and at the same time challenged the most fundamental "truths" that I have been taught about education. It is easy to both love some of the insights in this book and then be left lost trying to understand the alternative. I think I would of gained a better understanding of Egan's insights if I had read the predecessor The Educated Mind. One of Egan's main arguments is that the progressive school and its theories have resulted in "the reduction of academic content in primary schools in the 20th century". All the emphasis on making learning "natural" and "play-like" has cheated American students out of acquiring "cultural-cognitive tools" which should be the basis of all education. He challenges many of the long held beliefs of education and if anything I would recommend this book as a way of reconsidering the psychological pillars of education that all new teachers are trained in.

Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed

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Social Statics; or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed
Herbert Spencer
Manufacturer: Adamant Media Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1402183984
Release Date: 2000-12-04

Book Description

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1868 edition by Williams and Norgate, London.

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Principles of Ethics
Herbert Spencer
Manufacturer: Liberty Fund
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Spencer: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

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Spencer: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
Herbert Spencer
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0521437407

Book Description

This book presents Spencer's classic attempt to expose the flaws in socialism and to assert political individualism as the best way to guarantee social progress. It will be of interest to both undergraduates and specialists in politics, political theory, social policy, sociology and history.

Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life

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Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life
Mark Francis
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0801445906

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The ideas of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) profoundly shaped Victorian thought regarding evolutionary theory, the philosophy of science, sociology, and politics. In his day, Spencer's works ranked alongside those of Darwin and Marx in their importance to the development of disciplines as wide-ranging as sociology, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, and psychology. Yet during his lifetime--and certainly in the decades that followed--Spencer has been widely misunderstood. Both lauded and disparaged as the father of Social Darwinism (it was Spencer who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest"), and as an apologist for individualism and unrestrained capitalism, he was, in fact, none of these; he was instead a subtle and complex thinker.

In his major new intellectual biography of Spencer, Mark Francis uses archival material and contemporary printed sources to create a fascinating portrait of a man who attempted to explain modern life in all its biological, psychological, and sociological forms through a unique philosophical and scientific system that bridged the gap between empiricism and metaphysics. Vastly influential in England and beyond--particularly the United States and Asia--his philosophy was, as Francis shows, coherent and rigorous. Despite the success he found in the realm of ideas, Spencer was an unhappy man. Francis reveals how Spencer felt permanently crippled by the Christian values he had absorbed during childhood, and was incapable of romantic love, as became clear during his relationship with the novelist George Eliot.

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