Questions and Exercises
(1) Keep a pad by you for a week, and note down the occasions when your experience is wholly selfless and markedly selfful. Describe, as well as you can, the various self-experiences.
(2) Mention some of the superstitions that connect the name with the personality (p. 313). Is there any echo of these superstitions in our own civilised experience?
(3) On p. 319 a hint is given of the way in which vision, kinæsthesis and organic sensation, and verbal ideas might come to be preferred, as vehicles of the meaning of self. Can you make any further suggestion as regards kinæsthesis and organic sensation?
(4) A well-known medical writer remarks: “Self is stomach. The function of assimilating food is the most fundamental of all the functions; it is antecedent even to locomotion and propagation. Hence anything which directly affects the organism as a whole affects the stomach.” What self is here referred to?
(5) Professor Mach tells the following story. “I got into an omnibus one morning, after a tiring night on the train, just as some one else was entering from the far end. ‘Some broken-down schoolmaster,’ I thought. It was myself; there was a large mirror opposite the omnibus door” (see Analysis of Sensations, 1910, 4). What psychological laws does the story illustrate?
(6) What is meant by the ‘unity of consciousness’?
(7) Sir Walter Scott tells the tale of a boy, always at the top of his class, who, when asked a question, “fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his waistcoat”; Scott cut the button off, and the boy came down from his place of leadership (J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, i., 1837, 94). What is the psychology of the incident?
(8) Write a psychological criticism of the following statement: “Alike in conflict, rivalry, sense of liability to punishment or vengeance, etc., the truth is continually being borne in upon the mind of an animal that it is a separate individuality; and this though it be conceded that the animal is never able, even in the most shadowy manner, to think about itself as such. In this way there arises a sort of ‘outward self-consciousness,’ which differs from true or inward self-consciousness only in the absence of any attention being directed upon the inward mental states as such” (G. J. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man, 1888, 198 f.).
(9) Among the facts which have led to the hypothesis of a subconscious are (a) the existence of blind strivings, organic tendencies, etc., for which no conscious antecedent can be discovered; (b) the mechanisation of complicated movements, such as piano-playing; (c) the appearance in ‘memory’ of ideas which seem to have cropped up of themselves, i.e., have no assignable physical or mental condition; (d) the phenomena of secondary personality (Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ii., 1902, 606). How does the hypothesis help in such cases? and how does the psychology of this book take account of the facts?
(10) Consider any case of remedial suggestion, of what is popularly called faith-cure, that you happen to know at first-hand. Show how the hypothesis of subconscious agency might naturally occur to one who tries to ‘explain’ the facts, and show how science might deal with them apart from that hypothesis.
(11) (a) Satisfy yourself, by the collection of phrases, that the words ‘conscious,’ ‘subconscious,’ ‘unconscious,’ are used in very various meanings. (b) What does the word ‘conscious’ mean by derivation? How did it originate?
(12) The complaint is often made that scientific men do not popularise their results. What do you take to be the great stumbling-block in the way of popularisation?