Book Description:
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: our property and our social community. Psychology shows how, on the other hand, this idea can shrink and expel everything which is not essential for the continuity of this central group of psychical contents. Our personality does not depend upon our chance knowledge and chance sensations; it remains, once formed, if we lose even our arms and legs with their sensations; and thus the personality becomes that most central group of psychical contents which accompany the transformation of experiences into actions; that is, feelings and will. Thus psychology demonstrates a whole scale of personalities in every one of us, the psychological one, the sociological one, the ideal one; but each one is and can be only a group of psychical contents, a bundle of sensational elements. It is an idea which is endlessly more complicated, but theoretically not otherwise constituted, than the idea of our table or our house; just as, from the point of view of chemistry, the substance which we call a human body is theoretically not otherwise constituted than any other physical thing. The influence of the idea of personality means psychologically, then, its associative and inhibitory effects on the mechanism of the other contents of consciousness, and the unity and continuity of the personality mean that causal connection of its parts by which anything that has once entered our psychical life may be atany time reproduced, and may help to change the associative effects which come from the idea of ourselves. Has this psychological personality freedom of will? Certainly. Everything depends in this case upon the definitions, and the psychologist can easily construct a conception of freedom which is in the highest degree realized in the psychophysical organism and its psychological experiences. Freedom o...
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