Chapter 4 Chapter 3 Archetypal Psychologist-2

The doctrine for which the philosopher and archetypal psychologist George Berkeley (1685-1753) became famous always amuses students of history of philosophy courses and gives professors the opportunity to quote Cicero: "There is nothing like There is nothing more absurd than what a certain philosopher has said." Berkeley's philosophy was absurd, but many people remember it.His psychology is sound, but almost everyone has forgotten it. His status in history rests almost entirely on the three books he wrote before the age of 28.Otherwise, his life was meaningless.He was born in Ireland, studied philosophy at Trinity College in Duber Cup, obtained a doctorate, was canonized as a deacon of the Church of England at the age of 24, traveled and preached for a few years, and then served as a minister in County Cork, Ireland. Bishop of Cloin until death.

Berkeley has read a short article by Locke, which discusses such a problem, a person who is born without eyesight and later has eyesight, can he judge a sphere and a cube just by eyesight?Berkeley was inspired to write his first notable book, A New Treatise on Vision (1709).Locke thought it impossible for that person to judge. Berkeley agreed with him, but he was stimulated by this to conduct further research. His analysis was based on associationist psychology.With sight alone, he says, a newborn cannot distinguish distance, shape, size or relative position.Nor is it by repeated experience that a child learns to judge space—touching, stretching, walking.We associate visual cues of distance, size, and shape with what we've already learned through our other senses.

This argument is sound and a genuine contribution to the theory of perception psychology.In addition, he subdivided the seemingly simple experience of depth perception into more basic feelings, which foreshadowed, or perhaps led to the "molecular" analysis of later generations of psychology-combining all experiences according to their simplest components. method of analysis. But if Berkeley was realistic in the psychology of perception, he was an otherworldly giant in the philosophy for which he is famous.Philosophy has always given psychologists trouble; Berkeley's psychology has given philosophers trouble.As a youth of twenty-one he began to think that Newtonian science of materialism was threatening religion, and he told himself in his diary that if the dogma of materialism could be abolished, the "demons" of atheists of all shades would plan" will be self-defeating.

For a 21-year-old dreaming of shattering such a global belief in the existence of matter—and publishing, at 25, a work explaining his dream called The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)— —It is at least absurd, if not idiotic. (His third major work, published in 1713, restated his views in dialogue form.) Berkeley, however, persisted until he came to the final conclusion that Locke was between primary and secondary qualities the distinction made.If all knowledge came from our senses, we would know nothing of the external world but these senses; but these are secondary qualities.How do we know that the substance or substance that the original quality hides is real?In dreams we can see living trees, houses, and mountains, but these are illusions; why can we assume that the sensations we have during waking times are necessarily better proof that something is real? ?According to Berkeley:

How is it possible for us to know all this, although it can be said that collective, figurative, and movable substances may exist independently without thinking, and they correspond to some of our ideas about physical objects?We can know it, either by feeling or reasoning.As for our senses, by which we alone know some senses of the existence of perceptions... (As for reasoning,) what reasoning can lead us to believe in the existence of objects, without requiring the thought by which we derive perceptions? ...It may be that we are all affected by all the thoughts we have now, but without these thoughts, and some thoughts imaginable with them, there is no object.

As far as we can know so far, what exists is only what we perceive.What is not felt may not exist at all, because it appears to us very differently (a statement that will be repeated in modern times as Phenomenalist Psychology). Berkeley was no fool; he admits in his preface to The Principles of Human Knowledge that certain passages, taken out of context, may lead to "absurd conclusions."And the scoffers have said he doesn't make sense, because he declares that there is no real world of any kind at all, that all that exists is only in our imaginations—that a tree exists because we see it, when When we look aside, it no longer exists.Berkeley, however, saves the whole world through his relationship with God, the eternal perceiver who sees all things at all times simultaneously.There may not be a physical world, but the universe as God perceives it is stable and enduring; God sees a thing even when we do not see it, so when we no longer see the thing , things don't cease to exist, even when we stop looking at them. The 20th-century British theologian Father Ronald Knox summed up Berkeley's views with admiration in a famous five-line ballad:

The courtyard of four was already empty, The tree of wisdom is still growing, A young man casually asked, As ordered, God must have been amazed. (An anonymous person replied: Dear Sir: Your oddity is really out of shape: I was just walking around in the four-person courtyard. The tree of wisdom thus remains where it is, For the faithful God still watches, It's me, the reader, who is enthusiastic and quick-hearted. ) Berkeley's theory poses a great question to psychologists and philosophers alike, who find it unanswerable in these words themselves.Many years later, when Boswell and Dr. Johnson were walking one day in August 1763, the former asked the latter how he should refute Berkeley's theory.Dr. Johnson kicked a boulder hard, it bounced back, and he said, "That's how I refute it." He should have known better, Berkeley might have answered him, that the fastening of the stone Sex and quality, and Johnson bouncing off the rock, were just sensations that God had poured into his head, without any evidence of anything physical causing them.

There is a subtler and better answer than Dr. Johnson's, but none more succinct and more sensible than that of Hume: Berkeley's view, he says, "allows no answer, nor It creates confidence." However, David Hume (1711-1776) himself caused a great deal of trouble for philosophy and psychology in his psychological writings.First, let's meet the brightest star of the Scottish revival. In Scotland, as elsewhere in the Western world, Revivalism was a popular 18th-century philosophical movement characterized by a reliance on science and reason, a questioning of traditional religion and a belief in global human progress.Hume could not have seen in his childhood how he could have become an authority on the movement in two respects: he had been born into a privileged Presbyterian family in Edinburgh, and had embraced Calvinist theology as a child.As a child he looked dull (his own mother said he was a "very fine, well-natured crater, but not very bright-headed"), but that dullness may have been due to his dullness False impressions created by his tendency to be overweight and overweight; he was bright enough to attend Edinburgh University at the age of 12.As for his Calvinism, at fifteen he was already avidly reading the philosophical works of his day, and by eighteen he was an apostate to Calvinism.A later account of the matter said: "Since he began to read Locke and Clark, he has never had any joy in faith."

Hume was the second child in the family and thus inherited only a small inheritance.He studied law because of this, but he didn't like law at all, so that he almost lost his mind.He found the stinginess in the merchant's office equally intolerable. At the age of 23, he decided to make a living as a philosopher, so he went to France to find a cheap living.He settled at La Fletcher (where Descartes had studied), and, though not able to go to college, he finally persuaded the Jesuits to let him use the library.In only two years he completed his two-volume Essay on Human Nature: An Attempt at the Introduction of Moral Themes by Experimental (Newtonian) Reasoning (1738), in which he introduced for the first time own psychology.

He had hoped that the book would bring him great fame, but he was devastated when it attracted hardly any attention. (He later rewrote the book, in a simpler form, with slightly better results.) Forced to make a living, he worked for a while as a tutor to a young man, and then as private secretary to General James St. Clair.In this position, he made a good income, put on a red uniform, ate well, and gradually put on weight.One interviewer described him as having a broad, fat face "without any expression but dullness," and his build more like that of a magistrate than of an elaborate philosopher. Home.However, people cannot be judged by appearances, and the sea cannot be measured. Appearances are sometimes deceiving. It didn't take long for Hume to save enough money to concentrate on writing.The political, economic, philosophical, historical and religious writings of his mature years brought him coveted fame.In France, although he was round and stout, he soon became a guest of various salons, and was praised by Voltaire and Diderot.In London, his home became a salon, frequented by Adam Smith and other liberal thinkers, and everyone talked and talked about everything.

Friends and acquaintances considered him intelligent, friendly, kind, and patient, and he thought so of himself, too, who he described as "a man of his own accord." (At 23 he let a young The woman was pregnant, and at the age of 37 went down on her knees to court a married countess, unsuccessfully.) Although he did not like Spinoza because he was an atheist, he was still an atheist after all. skeptic.When Boswell, lying in bed dying of rectal cancer, asked if he now did not believe that there was an afterlife there, Hume replied that it was a "most irrational fantasy".After all, Hume was a thorough revivalist. Hume's main purpose in writing "An Essay on Human Nature" was to develop a moral philosophy based on "the science of man," which actually refers to psychology.So he worked hard to build a theory of human passions and our perceptions of passions, which led him to understand where our thoughts come from.He approached the question in the manner of a true empiricist: "Since the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, it is only by experience and observation that we can give this science itself a solid foundation." Base." Of course, although Hume quoted and criticized the work of others extensively, he relied primarily on his own introspective observations.As a thorough empiricist who indisputably rejects all questions about the nature of the immaterial soul—the thinking "I" that was once so important to Descartes—he declares, The nature of the soul is "a non-intellectual matter" not worth discussing at all.His own view of this consciously capable self was based on careful observation of his own thought processes, which he believed to be composed entirely of sensations: When I go very privately into this thing I call myself, I always stumble upon this or that particular feeling, hot or cold, light or dark, love or hate, or pain , or happiness... I venture to say that all human beings are like this, and they are just a lot of different feelings. Hume made a distinction between "impressions" (his word for sensations or perceptions) and "thoughts" (the same experiences but without the physical presence, such as in recollection, in thinking, and in dreams).Like Locke, he said that these simple elements were the building blocks of complex and abstract ideas.But in what way?Here, he has gone farther than Locke.There must be a "principle of association," which, he reasoned, takes three forms: "some quality, that which this association produces, through which, and in this way, thought is passed from a thought to Another way of thinking, these qualities are three things, namely, similarity in time and space, continuity, and cause and effect." Thought by this association, or united by these three properties, appears to Hume to be the fundamental principle of thought, as important for its operation as gravity is for the motion of the planets.He even called association "a kind of attraction" that connects ideas together.On the point of association, therefore, he knew better than Locke did, for Locke relied on association chiefly to explain abnormal connections between thoughts, but not to regard it as a universal mental process. So far nothing has happened.But although Hume was convinced that he had found the basic scientific laws of thought, he went on to undercut the foundations of the science itself by explaining one of the three forces of association, cause and effect.He did not claim, as is often the case, that there are no causes and effects; but he did say that we cannot experience causality directly, so we cannot know what it is or even prove that it exists.We only know that some phenomena seem always, or almost always, to be followed by another, and we therefore infer that the first caused the second.However, this is only an expectation based on the association between these two phenomena: The idea of ​​cause and effect is derived from experience, which tells us that these particular objects have always been related to each other in all past cases.... All our reasoning concerning cause and effect is no more than It comes from habit, not from anything else. Cause and effect are nothing but habits of thought.We don't and can't experience or perceive it with basic sensory sensations; we just know that when one thing happens, another thing happens.To predict that this will always be the case is to make a mistake; we can only infer that when A happens, B is likely to follow. Hume concludes that we believe in causality, and in the external world, not because we really know they exist, but because his skepticism is so unbelievable: It is impossible, by any means, to justify our own understandings or our feelings... When doubts naturally arise from deep and secret reflections on these subjects, the more we think about More doubts will arise, whether to confirm or deny it.Carelessness or inattention may give us a solution.For this reason, I rely entirely on them, and, whatever the reader's point of view at the moment, I firmly believe that the hour he is being persuaded here is as much an external world as an internal one. Hume's devastating attack on the notion of causality is of great significance in the history of science, and especially in the history of psychology, because, as psychology strives to become a science, it has been striving to discover the laws of mental causality.Some psychologists in Hume's time and later have thus believed that psychology cannot arrive at causal explanations and should therefore deal only with reciprocal relations—the possibility that two things continue to occur simultaneously or successively.The irony is that Hume intentionally let empiricism and associationism, which became the basis of his moral system, survive, while his moral system, a kind of mild utilitarianism, has long since passed away and never returned. up. Empiricist-associationist psychology deals with some of the thorny problems of mind-body dualism and the theory of the innate mind, but, as in all sciences, new theories that answer old questions often pose new problems.Not only did this new psychological theory lead to subjectivism, raising doubts about the validity of causal explanations, but, by denying the main thought processes of perception and association, it was impossible to object consciousness, reasoning, language, unconscious Express any insight on higher mental phenomena such as thought, problem solving, and creativity.In fact, it would eventually prove useful in a slightly different form as a theory of animal psychology. It is the simplest explanation of how the mind forms abstract concepts. It is very satisfactory for some concepts derived from the senses, such as equality, but it can be described as some concepts that have no sense basis, such as virtue, soul, non-existence, possibility, necessity, or in geometry. It is not convincing to learn the non-metric nature of a point. Moreover, apart from Hobbes' atomistic conjectures on nerve impulses, the new theory ignores the physiology of mental phenomena and thus fails to explain reflex responses, let alone all the high-level atomic responses that make up most of human everyday behavior. Since Locke's time a host of empiricist-associationists, mostly in England, have been grappling with these problems, but they have made little progress, if any.Some of the work they did, however, represented an intrepid search for the unknown; if they didn't cross unmarked oceans, some of them at least did some mapping of the outer coastlines. David Hartley (1705-1757) was one of the latter.As a scholar and physician, he was inspired by Locke's work and wrote a long treatise, "Human Observation" (1749), in which he discussed associationism.Although he said nothing original, his treatment of the subject was so organized and systematic that, says the great historian of psychology Edwin G. Pauline, he turned associationism into A "genre". Moreover, as a physician, Hartley was well aware that Locke had omitted physiology, and he endeavored to represent the A more complete psychology.It was an admirable effort, but unfortunately, in the mid-18th century, the neurophysiology he offered was largely imaginary.He derived from Newtonian physics the idea that vibrations of external matter must cause vibrations of minute particles within nerves (which he asserted must be solid, not hollow).These vibrations produce miniature counterparts, "vibrators ... the physiological counterpart of thought," a complete figment of his imagination, but less so than Descartes' hollow nerves and vitalism. A little closer to the truth.In addition, it kept associationists' interest in the physical basis of mental phenomena alive. In Scotland, Thomas Read (1710-1796), Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), and Thomas Brown (1778-1820), Scottish university professors and Presbyterian scholars, were all involved in the development of associationism. to make it more palatable to believers.They felt that, notwithstanding its interpretation by Locke and Hume, it was too mechanical and an affront to the humanity of man.In addition, Hume's skeptical attitude towards causality and the external world is contradictory to religious dogma.These three scholars thus changed Associationism and added something to it to fix these mistakes. Their answer to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume is actually remarkably simple: subjectivism and skepticism go against common sense.People of all nations and of all ages believe in the existence of the external world and in the existence of cause and effect because common sense dictates it—which is exactly what Dr. Johnson is saying by kicking a rock.It's not a good scientific conclusion, but at least it doesn't do science any harm. Reed also makes a good point that simple laws of association appear woefully inadequate as an explanation of complex mental functions.So he modified and expanded the age-old concept of mental function—innate special abilities—and came up with dozens of names.Future psychologists will go to great lengths to prove or disprove the existence of these mental functions. Brown made a small but specific contribution to associationism: he proposed that there are primary and secondary laws of "suggestion" (association), and that the latter, in special cases, alter the operation of the former.Therefore, the word "cold" may evoke the association of "darkness" at one time, but at another time and place, it will have the association of "hot".However, a valuable insight was overlooked and not re-recognized until the emergence of experimentalist methods nearly a century later. James Mill (1773-1836), a social theorist, utilitarian philosopher, and journalist, presented his own associationist views in The Analysis of the Phenomena of Human Consciousness (1829).Instead of expanding the theory, he made a stunning simplification of it.He said that there are only two classes of conscious elements—feeling and thinking—and that all associations arise from one factor, proximity, the temporal simultaneity or proximity of two experiences.Complex thoughts are nothing more than the connection of simple thoughts; the idea of ​​"all things" is not an abstraction, but a simple collection or accumulation of all one's simple and complex thoughts."This brings association as a dogma to the lowest degree of logic, mechanics, and molecular simplicity," said Robert Watson. Still, some of the famous behaviorists of the 20th century sounded a lot like Mill in intellectual offspring. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the son of James, was primarily a philosopher, and he wrote in "A System of Logic" (1843) and "A Survey of the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton" (1865) discussed psychology.He returned to mainstream associationism much of what his father had cut away, especially some assumptions about the formation of complex ideas.Unlike Mill before him, he saw these complex ideas not as collections of simple elements, but as fusions of these elements, much like chemical compounds whose properties do not correspond to those of their constituent parts.Correspondingly, he said, the laws of association cannot tell us where complex ideas come from, nor how they are composed; we can only know these things from experience and direct experiment.Therefore, Mill's contribution lies in correcting the course of associationism and bringing it into the right track of experimental psychology. Alexander Bein (1818-1903) was a friend of John Stuart Mill who lived until the birth of scientific psychology.Some scholars say that he was the last philosopher and psychologist, others say that he was the first true psychologist, because he devoted most of his life to psychology and brought physiology into the Psychology, more than any of his predecessors.This physiology is not imaginary, it is not Hartley's physiology; he visited nineteenth-century anatomists and learned from their writings.The mechanism he expresses in his discussions of perception and movement is closer to modern theory than the early archetypal psychologists. However, the physiology of his day was not capable of explaining higher-level mental processes.Bein's psychology was thus also largely mainstream associationism.He did, however, point out many of the limitations.He pointed out that it cannot account for novel and innovative ideas.Although he denied that there is an innate mind, he said that infants' minds are not a blank slate, they have differences in reflexes, intuition, and sensitivity.Although no school or great theory is associated with his name, his writings contain many original ideas that later scholars would soon develop further. While the explorers of consciousness were heading in one direction in England and France (where empiricism had a great influence on the liberal intellectuals of the Renaissance), German explorers were heading in one direction. Carl's path was groped forward.Something in German culture and spirit made German philosophers have a great preference for some gloomy metaphysics, soul-body dualism and innateism.However, this direction also leads to some valuable things, mainly referring to the theory of consciousness developed by Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of the idealist school. Before Kant, German philosophers, despite their intellectual prowess, made little contribution to human understanding of mental processes.In fact, perhaps the brightest thinker of the seventeenth century made a sudden and fruitless foray into psychology; his brand of metaphysics led him astray like a misguided compass.Still, he deserves brief attention, because his thought at least greatly simplifies the tradition that led to Kant's philosophy. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was born in Leipzig, Saxony, he suffered from rickets, and his knees were bent outwards, but he was a genius, 20 He obtained a doctorate in law at the age of 18, served as a diplomat in the French and British courts, invented calculus at the same time as Newton (he and Newton had a fierce dispute about who invented this science first), and Published extensively on a range of philosophical topics.Although many of his ideas are worthy of respect, Leibniz is most famous today because of his two absurd ideas.One of them is familiar to anyone who has read Voltaire's The Naive: Since God is supremely perfect, it follows that in creating the heavens and the earth he chose the best solution...Since in understanding God all possibilities require existence in proportion to his perfection, so , the actual world, as a result of all these requirements, must be the most perfect. These are Leibniz's words, not Voltaire's; they are Voltaire's parody of Dr. Ponnos himself, as he rattles off his deep philosophical insights: "In this best of all worlds, it's all about making this world better." Another eccentric conception of Leibniz's is that the world is made up of innumerable "monoliths"—the final building blocks of matter, which are some kind of soul, dimensionless, unidentifiable, and immune to external influence.What appears to be physical throughout the universe is actually the way these non-physical entities feel each other distributed in space.Leibniz conceived of this because he wanted to solve some difficult problems in classical metaphysical philosophy, including some problems in the mind-body dualism.It is not easy to grasp his theory, but since the "monophysics" will fend for itself along with him, there is no need for us to take the trouble to touch the stone with an egg. However, monadics did lead him to think that there are different levels of consciousness, which is a new idea in psychology.Because a single body is extremely small, they cannot produce consciousness alone, but when they accumulate, their subtle feelings will accumulate to form complex mental functions, including consciousness; the more complicated the way of accumulation , the more mental functions.Although animals also have feelings, they are unconscious, but human beings are conscious; that is to say, there are more than one level of consciousness.This was long before what Freud meant in terms of the subconscious and the preconscious, but it was only the beginning. One aspect of Leibniz's psychology does lead in a very useful direction.To explain the origin of consciousness, he posited a process he called "aperception," which through certain innate patterns or beliefs enables us to be aware of many small unconscious sensations and understand them.For example, we don’t need to learn to know that “everything exists now” and that “it is impossible for a thing to exist and not exist at the same time”.In the same way, the correctness of reasoning—that is, of logical principles—is hereditary.These innate thoughts are not concrete concepts, but methods of understanding experience.Kant would later transform this concept into a theory of history. There was another aspect of monophysics that could have led psychology to a dead end, but luckily no one, except Leibniz himself, took it seriously.How can anything happen in the world since the single body is immune to external influences?And, it seems, how do things still influence each other?Leibniz's answer is that God has arranged that the infinite changes of all single entities take place in a "pre-established harmony";Thus, whatever happens in the mind corresponds one-to-one with what happens in the body, without any interaction between the two: "God originally created the soul, and everything else in reality, in this way , that is, everything in the universe must be produced according to its own characteristics and spontaneity relative to its own perfection, while at the same time conforming to things that do not need to be compared to itself.” This is again Heylinks’s The theory of two bells, only now, that each minuscule unity is a bell, showing time with every other bell. This theory would have rendered psychology unnecessary, since it described mental phenomena as psychological responses to stimuli in the external world organized around a fixed and pre-determined order and as illusions.This shows where a brilliant mind can go if it is guided by a flawed compass.Fortunately, few people followed the path he pointed. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of modern times, was certainly one of the least understood, although that is hardly an appropriate criterion.We're glad we only needed to be interested in his psychology, and that part just happened to be accessible. Kant's biography sounds like a mocking reference to the life of his ivory tower intellectual.He was born in Koenigsberg in Prussia, entered the university at the age of 16, and taught here until the age of 73. Except for walking within 40 miles of the city, he has never traveled far in his life.He was less than 5 feet tall, with a sunken chest, lived the life of a bachelor, and remained unchanged throughout his life, supposedly to preserve his fragile health.Woke up by the footman at five every morning, he spent two hours studying, two hours lecturing, writing until one in the afternoon, and then going to a restaurant for dinner.At 3:30 p.m., he walks on time for an hour, no matter the weather.He walks a path under the lime tree, breathing only through his nose (he considers it unhealthy to open his mouth open outdoors), and does not speak to anyone while doing so. (He is very punctual, and the neighbors check their watches according to his daily walks. One day he did not come for a walk on time, and the neighbors were very worried. He has been reading Rousseau's "Emile" that day, and he is too absorbed so that he forgets himself.) The rest of the day he would spend reading and preparing for the next day's lecture.Go to bed around 9-10pm. Kant wrote and lectured on a broad spectrum: ethics, theology, cosmology, aesthetics, logic, and the theory of knowledge.Liberal in politics and theology, he sympathized with the French Revolution until the Reign of Terror, believed in democracy, and loved freedom.他是莱布尼兹的弟子，直到中年他读了休谟然后说，“从教条主义的沉睡中醒了过来”，并得到启发，发展了一套比莱布尼兹详细得多的知识理论。 康德被休谟所说服，认为因果关系并非能够自证的，我们不能够用逻辑的办法证明它，可是，他确信，我们的确能够理解身边的现实，并且能够体验到外部事物和现象中的因果关系。How is this possible?他通过纯粹的思维活动来寻找答案。在12年的时间里，他盯着窗外教堂的尖顶认真地思索。然后，他只花了几个月的时间完成了他最为著名的作品（1781），在这本书的前言中，他直言不讳地说：“我在此斗胆宣称，没有哪一个形而上的问题没有在这里解决的，也没有通向解决问题的门径没有在这里提供一把钥匙的。” 尽管他在和其它一些著作中的行文是大部分读者不易理解的——他使用的术语很困难，他的观点也是深奥难解的——不过，他在前言中把自己对意识的基本观点讲得足够清楚了。他说，千真万确，经验只给了我们非常有限的知识，可是，经验远远不是意识惟一的知识来源： 经验远远不是我们的理解力会受到限制的惟一领域。经验告诉我们什么东西是存在的，可它不能够告诉我们什么东西一定就是存在的，什么东西一定是不存在的。因此，它就永远不能给我们以任何普遍的真理；而我们的理性，它对于这类的知识特别感兴趣，我们的理性受到经验的刺激，而非因为经验而满足。普遍真理，其本身同时也具有内在的必然性的特点，它们是独立于经验之外的——它们本身就非常清楚，非常确切。 而如此明确的真理是存在的，数学就是一个合适的例子。比如，我们相信，而且对自己的信仰非常明确和肯定，即二加上二总会得出四。我们是如何得到这个确定性的？不是通过经验，因为经验只提供给我们一种可能性，而是通过我们意识当中天生的结构得来的，从意识在里面发生作用的自然而不可避免的方式中得来。因为人类的意识并非仅仅是一张白纸，任由经验在上面书写，也不仅仅是一堆感觉；它积极地组织和转换，它把混乱的经验变成纯粹的知识。 我们开始通过在时空中重新组织事物和现象的相互关系而获取知识——不是通过经验，而是通过天生的能力；空间和时间都是Anschauung（“直觉”或者“直观”），或者是先天决定的、我们借此观察事物的方法。 那么，把我们对空间和时间的感觉数据组织起来以后，就可以通过其它一些天生思想或者超验的原理（康德用的述语是“范畴”）来作出有关它们的其它一些判断了，这些都是内在的机械原理，意识就是通过这个原理来理解经验的。总共有12种范畴，包括整体、全体、现实、因果、相互性、存在和必然性。康德是通过对三段论法各种形式的苦心研究之后得出这些范畴的，可是，他相信这些范畴的确是公理存在的基本理由在于，没有这些范畴，我们就没有办法使一大堆杂乱的感觉有意义。 比如，每一个现象都有一个原因存在，我们并不是从经验中得知这一点的，如果我们缺乏感知因果的能力，我们就永远也不可能理解周围的任何事情。因此，事情可能是这样的，即，我们先天就辨识出了因果。同理，其它的一些范畴在柏拉图或者笛卡儿的感觉当中都不是天生的思想，而只是一些秩序的原则，它们使我们能够探索经验。是它们，而不是联想的法则，把经验组织成了有意义的知识的。 康德把意识看作过程而不是神经动作的观点，使德国心理学转向了对意识与“现象经验”的研究中。二元论仍然在流行，因为“意识”很明显是超验的——这是康德的话——现象与感觉和联想都绝然不同。他的理论会导致先天论心理学其它变种的兴起，特别是在德国，并在美国拥有了其现代的对等物，如果不是后裔的话，其中有诺姆·乔姆斯基的儿童语言理论，即儿童意识天生即有一种能力，可以理解口头语言的语法。 康德的先天论导致了有关意识的工作机制的好几种有价值的探索热线，可在一个方面，它证明是一种严重的后退。他认为，意识是一套过程，它们发生在时间中，但并不占有空间，这就使他推断出，精神过程是不能够进行测量的（因为它们并不占据空间），因而，心理学就不可能成为实验科学。康德传统的其他一些人会持续保持这个观点。虽然它以后会被证明是错误的，正如笛卡儿对动物精神和空心的神经的信念，它会推迟心理学作为一门科学的进展。 但仅止推迟而已。尽管天主教可以推迟，但最终还是不能够阻挡人类的知识，即太阳，而不是地球，才是太阳系的中心，最伟大的唯心主义哲学家的权威也不能阻挡心理学通过实验而成为一门科学。