A First Book in Psychology

"This book has been written in the ever strengthening conviction that psychology is most naturally, consistently, and effectively treated as a study of conscious selves in relation to other selves and to external objects--in a word, to their environment, personal and impersonal. However he defines his science, every psychologist talks and writes about selves--of myself and yourself--as conscious of people, of things, or of laws and formulae. The psychology of self, which this book sets forth, is a conscious adoption and scientific exposition of this natural and practically inevitable conception. In general, I have tried to make a simpler, more direct approach to the subject. In the earlier book, I treated psychology in a twofold fashion, both as science of selves and as science of ideas (or 'mental processes'), discussing all forms of consciousness from both points of view. I have here abandoned this double treatment, with the intent to simplify exposition, not because I doubt the validity of psychology as study of ideas, but because I question the significance and the adequacy, and deprecate the abstractness, of the science thus conceived. In a second fashion this book differs from the other. I have tried to embody what appear to me to be the important results of so-called functional psychology. That is to say, I have taken explicit account of the characteristic bodily reactions on environment which accompany perception, thought, emotion, and will; and I have briefly considered the various forms of consciousness as factors in conduct, and as significant in individual and in social development"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).