In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.
Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.
The dualism itself becomes a sort of presupposition or datum; its terms condition the further problem.
Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.
Psychology more than any other science has had its pseudo-scientific no less than its scientific period.
Plato stands for the union of truth and goodness in the supreme idea of God.
Like all science, psychology is knowledge; and like science again, it is knowledge of a definite thing, the mind.
The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.
The prehistorical and primitive period represents the true infancy of the mind.
All along we find that social life – religion, politics, art – reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.
The fact that tradition hinders the individual savage from thinking logically by no means proves that he cannot think logically.
Feeling is the consciousness of the resulting conditions – of success, failure, equilibrium, compromise or balance, in this continuous rivalry of ideas.
The reason of the close concurrence between the individuals progress and that of the race appears, therefore, when we remember the dependence of each upon the other.
After an interval of two and a half centuries, the tradition of mystic illumination renewed itself in Italy and Germany.