The New International Encyclopædia/Mind

MIND (AS. gemynd, Icel. minni, Goth. gamunds, memory, from AS. munan, Icel. muna, Goth. gamunan, to remember; ultimately connected with Lat. mens, Gk. μένος, menos, mind, Skt. man, to think). The collective term for the subject-matter of psychology (q.v.). The common-sense view of mind makes it a mind-substance, a spiritual agent, a real, simple, and unitary being, sharply opposed to material substance as ‘thought’ is opposed to ‘extension,’ yet interacting with the physical universe under some form of the causal law. This conception of mind has its root in primitive reflection upon the phenomena of sleep, dreams, trance, and death. It received philosophical treatment at the hands of the scholastic psychologists; and, in its current form, is practically a legacy from Descartes. It is doubtless kept alive by its emotional value; it satisfies human aspirations, and accords well with the natural anthropocentric notion of the world at large. It is still held by some psychologists: Ladd openly accepts it, and James, while rejecting it for his psychology, yet admits that, for his personal thinking, it appears “the line of least logical resistance.” Nevertheless, such a view of mind is wholly foreign to the spirit and to the requirements of modern psychology. In the first place, it is unsupported by psychological evidence. Had there been the same emotional temptation to reject minds as there has been to posit them, we may be sure that the arguments ordinarily urged in their favor would have received but scant attention. Secondly, the assumption of a real mind is superfluous. “The substantialist view of the soul,” says James, “is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear:” “the substantial soul explains nothing and guarantees nothing.” In so far, then, as this theory of mind is concerned, modern psychology is what Lange, the historian of materialism, named it: a psychology without a mind, a Psychologie ohne Seele. Even the few writers who still cling to the substantialist view make no use of the assumption in their actual presentation of psychological facts and laws; it is only in their concluding remarks, at the point of transition from psychology proper to metaphysics, that mind, the ‘unit being,’ is introduced. At the same time, it would be entirely erroneous to apply Lange's phrase, without qualification, to mental science. A psychology without some sort of mind would be impossible. The new psychology keeps the term mind, but defines it as the sum-total of an individual's mental experience. Just as a ‘plant’ is the organized whole of root, stem, leaves, and flowers, and not something above and behind these ‘parts,’ so is mind the organized whole of our mental processes (q.v.), the interwoven totality of thoughts, feelings, desires, volitions, etc., and not something above and behind these ‘manifestations’ of mentality.

Bibliography. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i. (New York, 1890); Ebbinghaus, Grundzüge der Psychologie, vol. i. (Leipzig, 1897); Wundt, Outlines of Psychologie (trans., ib., 1898); Titchener, Outline of Psychology (New York, 1899); Kuelpe, Outlines of Psychology (trans., ib., 1895); id., Introduction to Philosophy (trans., ib., 1897); Ladd, Elements of Physiological Psychology (ib., 1889); id., Philosophy of Mind (ib., 1895). See Body and Mind; Consciousness; Elements, Conscious.