Downloads & Free Reading Options - Results

I am not satisfied with the account which has been given of the feelings and emotions in our books of mental science, and thence transferred into the common thought and literature of modern times. In this work I treat of the emotions as psychical acts, but I do not overlook their physiological concomitants and effects. I enter little into controversy. My aim has been to expound the truth, and leave it to shine in its own light. - Summary by Adapted from Preface

For the last thirty-four years I have been teaching Psychology by written lectures to students in Ireland and America. From year to year I have been improving my course, and I claim to have advanced with the times. As Uncle Toby's stockings were so often darned that he was not sure whether there remained a single thread of the original fabric, so my prelections have been so constantly mended that I do not know that a single sentence remains of my early lectures. I certainly wish this little work to be used as a textbook, and would thus widen and prolong my teaching power. But people say "dull as a text-book". In physical science and in literature they illuminate their books (as in the old missals) by figures. We cannot do this in mental science, as our thoughts have not forms nor colors. I maintain, however, that they have livelier features. I have sought to avoid dryness by illustrating mental laws by examples taken from human nature. As general laws are drawn from particular cases, so they are best understood by concrete facts coming under our experience. - Summary by Preface

Dr. McCosh, in his second volume on Psychology, treats of the Motive Powers as distinct from the Cognitive Powers, which were discussed in tho first volume of the series. He regards this division of the human faculties as better and more natural than the more common arrangement of Kant into the faculties of cognition, feeling, and will, the great objection to which is that it leaves out of sight the moral power or conscience. Not that Kant ignores the moral nature, but that he treats it as if it were a phase of the rational faculty — reason having the power to awaken moral susceptibility and to hold it, as it were, to the truth and right action through the will. The motive powers are arranged by Dr. McCosh under three heads, — emotions, conscience, will, — making conscience or the moral faculty one of the leading faculties. Conscience, according to Dr. McCosh, is both a cognitive and a motive power, and so in a sense is superior to all the other faculties. By far the greater part of this book is given to the consideration of the emotions, which are considered in various aspects, and classified and described with great minuteness. The appetences or inclinations, the ruling idea in them, and the causes which excite or repress them, are set forth in methodical order, as also their various complex divisions and characteristics. The last section is devoted to the Will under ten different aspects, and to brief statements with regard to the religious tendency. Dr. McCosh certainly presents us in this treatise with a very compact, lucid, and comprehensive view of the subject under discussion. - Summary by The North American Review