The Mental Hygiene of Childhood Author:William Alanson White Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter II The Fundamental Instincts MODERN psychology sees in conduct a series of actions brought about for the purpose of changing conditions to make them ... more »more in keep— ing with the desires of the individual. As evolution has taken place there has come about a closer and closer relation between man and his environment. / For example: primitive man can only live in the tropics ( where it is warm; civilized man can adjust himself to any temperature by changing the quality and quantity of his clothes. This increasing power of adjustment to the environment is based upon a greater capacity for knowing it and then acting upon the basis of such knowledge. It is our sense organs, more particularly the eye, the ear, and the skin, that analyze the environment and, so to speak, report upon its different characteristics, but it is the interest back of the activities which causes us to focus our sense organs on our environment for the purpose of becoming more intimately acquainted with it.1 1 In the old academic psychology the attempt was made to classify and to describe the various aspects of consc1ousness largely as they appeared to the student by looking within, — introspection. Various so-called faculties of the mind were invented as hypotheses to account for what was found and so the will, the intellect, the emotions were supposed to be at the back of mental phenomena, which latter were then examined minutely. To make this somewhat clearer: If I look at a piece of ice I see, or technically speaking, perceive it as to its form, color, distance from me, and coldness. It is, for example, a block about a foot square, transparent or white, about three feet in front of me. It also looks cold, and hard, and brittle, and as if it were quite heavy. How do I arrive at all these concl...« less