Psychology General Introduction

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: In all these cases the obvious significance of increasing complexity is increasing autonomy of the individual. The process of evolution has resulted in a more stable set of inner conditions, which make it possible for the vital processes to go on without interruption or hazard from fluctuations in the outer world. Inner organization essential to highest forms of personal behavior. The meaning of a complex nervous system thus becomes clear. Nature is evolving an organism in which inner processes are to be of prime importance. Impressions must be received from the outer world, but the important question now is, What will be done with these impressions in the inner nervous system, where the impression is distributed and combined with other impressions and with traces of past impressions ? We are thus brought to the point where we realize the meaning of the sharp antithesis between inner personality and sensory impressions. Two men receive the same impression; to one it means much, to the other little. The reason for the difference is that in one case there is a highly organized central response, in the other there is no such response. Our later chapters will have much to say about the inner organization of the nervous system. In the meantime, it should be kept in mind that behavior runs parallel with this highest evolution. Man is not only complex in his inner nervous life, but he is complex in his acts. When one thinks of the complexity of speech or of the forms of skill exhibited in the arts, one realizes that behavior and nervous organization go hand in hand at the highest levels of life as well as at the lower levels, which were studied in the opening paragraphs of this chapter. Characteristics of behavior of higher animals. The purposes of our present discussion wil...