The Science of Human Nature by William Henry Pyle (if you liked this book TXT) 📖

SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

Copyright, 1917,
By SILVER, BURDETT & COMPANY.

This book is written for young students in high schools and normal schools. No knowledge can be of more use to a young person than a knowledge of himself; no study can be more valuable to him than a study of himself. A study of the laws of human behavior,—that is the purpose of this book.

What is human nature like? Why do we act as we do? How can we make ourselves different? How can we make others different? How can we make ourselves more efficient? How can we make our lives more worth while? This book is a manual intended to help young people to obtain such knowledge of human nature as will enable them to answer these questions.

I have not attempted to write a complete text on psychology. There are already many such books, and good ones too. I have selected for treatment only such topics as young students can study with interest and profit. I have tried to keep in mind all the time the practical worth of the matters discussed, and the ability and experience of the intended readers.

This book can be only a guide to you. You are to help your students study human nature. You must, to some extent, be a psychologist yourself before you can teach psychology. You must yourself be a close and scientific student of human nature. Develop in the students the spirit of inquiry and investigation. Teach them to look to their own minds and their neighbor’s actions for verification of the statements of the text. Let the students solve by observation and experiment the questions and problems raised in the text and the exercises. The exercises should prove to be the most valuable part of the book. The first two chapters are the most difficult but ought to be read before the rest of the book is studied. If you think best, merely read these two chapters with the pupils, and after the book is finished come back to them for careful study.

In the references, I have given parallel readings, for the most part to Titchener, Pillsbury, and Münsterberg. I have purposely limited the references, partly because a library will not be available to many who may use the book, and partly because the young student is likely to be confused by much reading from different sources before he has worked out some sort of system and a point of view of his own. Only the most capable members of a high school class will be able to profit much from the references given.

You are beginning the study of human nature. You can not study human nature from a book, you must study yourself and your neighbors. This book may help you to know what to look for and to understand what you find, but it can do little more than this. It is true, this text gives you many facts learned by psychologists, but you must verify the statements, or at least see their significance to you, or they will be of no worth to you. However, the facts considered here, properly understood and assimilated, ought to prove of great value to you. But perhaps of greater value will be the psychological frame of mind or attitude which you should acquire. The psychological attitude is that of seeking to find and understand the causes of human action, and the causes, consequences, and significance of the processes of the human mind. If your first course in psychology teaches you to look for these things, gives you some skill in finding them and in using the knowledge after you have it, your study should be quite worth while.

W. H. PYLE.

There are at least two possible approaches to the study of psychology by teacher-training students in high schools and by beginning students in normal schools.

One of these is through methods of teaching and subject matter. The other aims to give the simple, concrete facts of psychology as the science of the mind. The former presupposes a close relationship between psychology and methods of teaching and assumes that psychology is studied chiefly as an aid to teaching. The latter is less complicated. The plan contemplates the teaching of the simple fundamentals at first and applying them incidentally as the occasion demands. This latter point of view is in the main the point of view taken in the text.

The author has taught the material of the text to high school students to the end that he might present the fundamental facts of psychology in simple form.

W. W. C.

Science. Before attempting to define psychology, it will be helpful to make some inquiry into the nature of science in general. Science is knowledge; it is what we know. But mere knowledge is not science. For a bit of knowledge to become a part of science, its relation to other bits of knowledge must be found. In botany, for example, bits of knowledge about plants do not make a science of botany. To have a science of botany, we must not only know about leaves, roots, flowers, seeds, etc., but we must know the relations of these parts and of all the parts of a plant to one another. In other words, in science, we must not only know, we must not only have knowledge, but we must know the significance of the knowledge, must know its meaning. This is only another way of saying that we must have knowledge and know its relation to other knowledge.

A scientist is one who has learned to organize his knowledge. The main difference between a scientist and one who is not a scientist is that the scientist sees the significance of facts, while the non-scientific man sees facts as more or less unrelated things. As one comes to hunt for causes and inquire into the significance of things, one becomes a scientist. A thing or an event always points beyond itself to something else. This something else is what goes before it or comes after it,—is its cause or its effect. This causal relationship that exists between events enables a scientist to prophesy. By carefully determining what always precedes a certain event, a certain type of happening, a scientist is able to predict the event. All that is necessary to be able to predict an event is to have a clear knowledge of its true causes. Whenever, beyond any doubt, these causes are found to be present, the scientist knows the event will follow. Of course, all that he really knows is that such results have always followed similar causes in the past. But he has come to have faith in the uniformity and regularity of nature. The chemist does not find sulphur, or oxygen, or any other element acting one way one day under a certain set of conditions, and acting another way the next day under exactly the same conditions. Nor does the physicist find the laws of mechanics holding good one day and not the next.

The scientist, therefore, in his thinking brings order out of chaos in the world. If we do not know the causes and relations of things and events, the world seems a very mixed-up, chaotic place, where anything and everything is happening. But as we come to know causes and relations, the world turns out to be a very orderly and systematic place. It is a lawful world; it is not a world of chance. Everything is related to everything else.

Now, the non-scientific mind sees things as more or less unrelated. The far-reaching causal relations are only imperfectly seen by it, while the scientific mind not only sees things, but inquires into their causes and effects or consequences. The non-scientific man, walking over the top of a mountain and noticing a stone there, is likely to see in it only a stone and think nothing of how it came to be there; but the scientific man sees quite an interesting bit of history in the stone. He reads in the stone that millions of years ago the place where the rock now lies was under the sea. Many marine animals left their remains in the mud underneath the sea. The mud was afterward converted into rock. Later, the shrinking and warping earth-crust lifted the rock far above the level of the sea, and it may now be found at the top of the mountain. The one bit of rock tells its story to one who inquires into its causes. The scientific man, then, sees more significance, more meaning, in things and events than does the non-scientific man.

Each science has its own particular field. Zoölogy undertakes to answer every reasonable question about animals; botany, about plants; physics, about motion and forces; chemistry, about the composition of matter; astronomy, about the heavenly bodies, etc. The world has many aspects. Each science undertakes to describe and explain some particular aspect. To understand all the aspects of the world, we must study all the sciences.

A Scientific Law. By law a scientist has reference to uniformities which he notices in things and events. He does not mean that necessities are imposed upon things as civil law is imposed upon man. He means only that in certain well-defined situations certain events always take place, according to all previous observations. The Law of Falling Bodies may be cited as an example. By this law, the physicist means that in observing falling bodies in the past, he has noticed that they fall about sixteen feet in the first second and acquire in this time a velocity of thirty-two feet. He has noted that, taking into account the specific gravity of the object and the resistance of the air, this way of falling holds true of all objects at about the level of the sea.

The more we carefully study the events of the world, the more strongly we come to feel that definite causes, under the same circumstances, always produce precisely the same result. The scientist has faith that events will continue to happen during all the future in the same order of cause and effect in which they