Psychical Sentence Examples

On the contrary, his contention is that of Fechner - that all knowable things are inner psychical realities beneath outer physical appearances - the invisible symbolized by the visible.

Sensory Automatism is the term given by students of psychical research to a centrally initiated hallucination.

Phenomena of this kind play a large part in primitive ceremonies of divination and in our own day furnish much of the material of Psychical Research.

Solovyov's Modern Priestess of Isis, translated by Walter Leaf (1895), in Arthur Lillie's Madame Blavatsk y and Her Theosophy (1895), and in the report made to the Society for Psychical Research by the Cambridge graduate despatched to investigate her doings in India.

During an attack of fever he made observations on himself with reference to the action of quickened circulation upon thought, which led him to the conclusion that psychical phenomena were to be accounted for as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system.

His definitely expressed view was that psychical activity is " nothing but a radiation through the cells of the grey substance of the brain of a motion set up by external stimuli."

He divides phenomena into impressions and ideas, vivid and faint, object and subject, non-ego and ego, outer and inner, physical and psychical, matter and spirit; all of which are expressions of the same antithesis among phenomena.

Both, however, used this influence freely; and, whereas Lotze used the Leibnitzian argument from indivisibility to deduce indivisible elements and souls, Fechner used the Leibnitzian hypotheses of universal perception and parallelism of motions and perceptions, in the light of the .Schellingian identification of physical and psychical, to evolve a world-view (Weltansicht) containing something which was neither Leibnitz nor Schelling.

Fechner's second point was that, throughout the animated universe, physical processes accompany psychical processes without interaction.

Fechner's supposition was that the unity of consciousness belongs to the unity of the whole body; that the seat of the soul is the living body; that the soul changes its place as in different parts a process rises above the " threshold of consciousness "; and that soul is not substance but the single psychical life which has its physical manifestation in the single bodily life.

In 1860 appeared Fechner's Elemente der Psychophysik, a work which deeply affected subsequent psychology, and almost revolutionized metaphysics of body and soul, and of physical and psychical relations generally.

He now compared the spiritual and bodily sides of a man to the concave and convex sides of a circle, as inner and outer sides of the same process, which is psychical as viewed from within and physical as viewed from without.

He also maintained throughout the book that physical and psychical energy do not interfere, but that the psychical is, like a mathematical quantity, a function of the physical, depending upon it, and vice versa, only in the sense that a constant relation according to law exists, such that we may conclude from one to the other, but without one ever being cause of the other.

By his psychophysics he meant the exact doctrine of the relations of dependency between physical and psychical.

But, unfortunately for Fechner, the very opposite conclusion followed from the presuppositions of his parallelistic metaphysics, and from the Leibnitzian view of the conservation of energy, which he was the first in our time to use in order to argue that a physical cause cannot produce a psychical effect, on the ground that physical energy must be exactly replaced by physical energy.

Having satisfied himself in what he called " outer psychophysics," that the stimulus causes only the nervous process and not sensation, he passed to what he called " inner psychophysics," or the theory of the relation between nervous and psychical processes.

The second question he answered from his parallelistic metaphysics by deducing that even within the organism there is only a constant dependency of sensation on nervous process without causation, because the nervous process is physical but the sensation psychical.

Having long assumed that the whole world is animated throughout, and that there are always two parallel series, physical and psychical, he concluded that, while a physical stimulus is causing a physical nervous process, a psychical accompaniment of the stimulus is causing the sensation, which, according to him, is the psychical accompaniment of the nervous process; and that, as the whole physical and the whole psychical series are the same, differing only as outer and inner, this identity holds both of stimulus and its psychical accompaniment and of nervous process and its accompanying sensation.

The world, as he thought, on its physical side, always was a living body; and on its psychical side God always was its conscious spirit; and, so far from life arising from the lifeless, and consciousness from unconsciousness, the life and consciousness of the whole world are the origin of the lifeless and the unconscious in parts of it, by a kind of secondary automatism, while we ourselves are developed from our own mother-earth by differentiation.

By thus supposing a psychical basis to evolution, Fechner, anticipating Wundt, substituted a psychical development of organs for Darwinian accidental variation.

Shall we resign our traditional belief that the greater part of the world is mere body, but that its general adaptability to conscious organisms proves its creation and government by God, and take to the new hypothesis, which, by a transfer of design from God to Nature, supposes that everything physical is alive, and conducts its life by psychical impulses of its own?

When the later reaction to Kant arose against both Hegelianism and materialism, the nearly contemporary appearance of Fechner's Psychophysics began to attract experimental psychologists by its real as well as its apparent exactness, and both psychologists and metaphysicians by its novel way of putting the relations between the physical and the psychical in man and in the world.

Most stop here, but some go with Fechner to the full length of his metaphysical parallelism of the physical and psychical, as psychophysical, throughout the whole world.

On this assumption he deduces that in being conscious of our mental states we are conscious of soul not merely as it appears, but as it is in itself, and therefore can infer similar souls, other psychical unities, which are also things in themselves.

But what is the essence of this psychical reality which we thus immediately and mediately know?

Taking, then, will to be the essential thing in itself of which we are conscious, he deduces that we can infer that the psychical things in themselves beyond ourselves are also essentially " wills."

He interprets the external world to be the common basis of physical and psychical phenomena.

Riehl elaborates this bare suggestion into the metaphysical theory that the single basis of physical and psychical phenomena is neither bodily nor mental, nor yet space and motion.

He agrees with Fechner that physical process of nerve and psychical process of mind are really the same psychophysical process as appearing on the one hand to an observer and on the other hand to one's own consciousness; and that physical phenomena only produce physical phenomena, so that those materialists and realists are wrong who say that physical stimuli produce sensations.

It retains some relics of Fechner's influence; first, the theory of identity, according to which the difference between the physical and psychical is not a dualism, but everything is at once both; and secondly, the substitution of mathematical dependence for physical causality, except that, whereas Fechner only denied causality between physical and psychical, Mach rejects the entire distinction between causality and dependence, on the ground that " the law of causality simply asserts that the phenomena of Nature are dependent on one another."

He considered that the whole hypothesis that an outer physical thing causes a change in one's central nervous system, which again causes another change in one's inner psychical system or soul, is a departure from the natural view of the universe, and is due to what he called " introjection," or the hypothesis which encloses soul and its faculties in the body, and then, having created a false antithesis between outer and inner, gets into the difficulty of explaining how an outer physical stimulus can impart something into an inner psychical soul.

Its rejection of the whole relation of physical and psychical makes it almost too indefinite to classify among philosophical systems. But its main point is the essential co-ordination of ego and environment, as central part and counterpart, in experience.

According to him, we begin with an experience of ideas, in which object and idea are originally identical (V orstellungsobject); we divide this unitary experience into its subjective and objective factors; and especially in natural science we so far abstract the objects as to believe them at last to be independent things; but it is the office of psychology to warn us against this popular dualism, and to teach us that there is only a duality of psychical and physical, which are divisible, not separable, factors of one and the same content of our immediate experience; and experience is our whole knowledge.

Hence his fourth point is his psychological theory of parallelism of physical and psychical reduced to identity in unitary experience.

He accepts psychophysical parallelism in the sense that every psychical process has a physical accompaniment, every physiological function has a psychical meaning, but neither external stimulus nor physiological stimulus is cause of a psychical process, nor vice versa.

Precisely like Fechner, he holds that there is a physical causality and energy and there is a psychical causality and energy, parallels which never meet.

He uses this psychical causality to carry out his voluntarism into detail, regarding it as an agency of will directed to ends, causing association and understanding, and further acting on a principle which he calls the heterogony of ends; remarking very truly that each particular will is directed to particular ends, but that beyond these ends effects follow as unexpected consequences, and that this heterogony produces social effects which we call custom.

But while thus sharply distinguishing the physical and the psychical in appearance, he follows Fechner in identifying them in reality; except that Fechner's identification is noumenal, Wundt's phenomenal.

He does not, therefore, allow that there is a universal series of physical and psychical parallels.

According to his phenomenalism, the external stimulus and the physiological stimulus are both parallels of the same psychical process; the external body, as well as my body, is merely an object abstracted from an idea of my experience; and what is really known in every case is a unitary experience; divisible, but not separable, into body and soul, physical and psychical factors of one and the same unitary experience.

Further, Wundt declares that the psychical compound of sensations, with which, according to him, we actually start, is not a complex sensation, but a compound idea; so that I am expected to believe that, when I hear the chord of D, I am not conscious of single sensations of D, F, A, and have only a compound idea of the chord - as if the hearing of music were merely a series of ideas!

It follows that every psychical compound into which temporal and spatial ideas enter must itself be an idea; and, as time at any rate accompanies all our sensations, it follows that every psychical compound of sensations, containing as it does, always temporal, if not also spatial, ideas, must be a compound idea, and not, as nativists suppose, Schuppe for instance, a compound sensation.

Secondly, when Wundt comes to the psychical, he naturally infers from his narrow Kantian definition of substance that there is no proof of a substrate over and above all mental operations, and falsely thinks that he has proved that there is no substance mentally operating in the Aristotelian sense.

Thirdly, on the grounds that logical thinking adds the notion of substance, as substrate, to experience of the physical, but not of the psychical, and that the most proper being of mind is will, he concludes that wills are not active substances, but substance-generating activities (" nicht thatige Substanzen sondern substanzerzeugende Thdtigkeiten," System, 429) What kind of metaphysics, then, follows from this compound of psychology and epistemology?

It is not to be materialistic but ideal realism, because the physical and the psychical are inseparable parallels inexplicable by one another.

He maintained that the physical and the psychical are two orders which are parallel without interference; that the physical or objective order is merely phenomena, or groups of feelings, or " objects," while the psychical or subjective order is both a stream of feelings of which we are conscious in ourselves, and similar streams which we infer beyond ourselves, or, as he came to call them, " ejects "; that, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, we must carry these ejective streams of feelings through the whole organic world and beyond it to the inorganic world, as a " quasimental fact "; that at bottom both orders, the physical phenomena and the psychical streams, are reducible to feelings; and that therefore there is no reason against supposing that they are made out of the same " mind-stuff," which is the thing-in-itself.

Fechner, Wundt and Paulsen have fixed the conclusion in psychology that soul is not substance but unity of mental life; and Wundt concludes from the modern history of the term that substance or " substrate " is only a secondary conception to that of causality, and that, while there is a physical causality distinct from that of substance, psychical causality requires no substance at all.

Now insects that possess noxious attributes, and the same is true of other animals, usually have a conspicuous warning coloration which appeals to the eyes of enemies and helps them to remember more easily the cause of an unpleasant experience, helps in fact to establish a psychical association between a particular style of coloration and a nasty taste or a painful wound.

In the physiological basis of sense exist many impressions which, apart from and devoid of psychical accompaniment, reflexly influence motor (muscular) innervation.

That it is apparently devoid of psychical concomitant need not imply that the impressions concerned in it are crude and inelaborate.

The physical "touch" that initiates the psychical "touch" initiates, through the very same nerve channels, a reflex movement responsive to the physical "touch," just as the psychical "touch" may be considered also a response to the same physical event.

But in the decapitated animal we have good arguments for belief that we get the reflex movement alone as response; the psychical touch drops out.

He was one of the founders of the study of " Psychical Research," and his other writings on anthropology include The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897), Magic and Religion (1901) and The Secret of the Totem (1905).

According to him we only know these a priori principles through inner or psychical experience; they are not then to be regarded as transcendental factors of all experience, but as the necessary, constant elements discovered by us in our inner experience.

All psychical states may, according to him, be treated as incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its environment.

But he agrees with Schopenhauer in basing consciousness, in all its forms of reason, feeling or will, upon "automatic movement - psychical change," from which consciousness emerges and in which it disappears.

The investigations of the Society for Psychical Research show that premonitions, though rare in our own day, are not absolutely unknown.

The theory of psychophysical parallelism involves no doubt in the minds of the majority of its upholders the further assumption of some unity underlying both the physical and psychical series which may one day be discovered to be susceptible of scientific expression and interpretation.

And many scientific thinkers, while professing allegiance to a theory which insists upon the independence of each parallel series, in reality tacitly assume the superior importance if not the controlling force of the physical over the psychical terms. But a mere insistence upon the complete independence of the physical series coupled with the belief that its changes are wholly explicable as modes of motion, that the study of molecular physics is competent to explain all the phenomena of life and organic movements, is sufficient to eliminate the possibility of spontaneity and free origination from the universe.

That doctrine, if it is to possess cogency as a proof of the impossibility of the libertarian position, must assume that the amount of energy sufficient to account for physical and psychical changes is constant and invariable in quantity, an assumption which no scientific investigator is competent to prove.

He no doubt criticizes Plato's account of the nature of pleasure, arguing that we cannot properly conceive pleasure either as a " process " or as " replenishment " - the last term, he truly says, denotes a material rather than a psychical fact.

His theory assumes the correspondence of mind and body, and is applied pari passu to the formation of ideas from sensations, and of " compound vibratiuncules in the medullary substance " from the original vibrations that arise in the organ of sense.2 The same general view was afterwards developed with much vigour and clearness on the psychical side alone by James Mill in his Analysis of the Human Mind.

He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, and was a member of the Metaphysical Society.

He was deeply interested in psychical phenomena, but his energies were primarily devoted to the study of religion and philosophy.

In his Psychology Herbart rejects altogether the doctrine of mental faculties as one refuted by his metaphysics, and tries to show that all psychical phenomena whatever result from the action and interaction of elementary ideas or presentations (Vorstellungen).

If a psychic claimant really could predict winners by using psi this would be of great interest to psychical research.

Into the receiver flow all psychical emanations from that arcade fun game fun brain game arcade really unsuspicious citizen.

I tell you it's a scientific and psychical impossibility for you to continue to love her!

Of these, the former endeavours to explain the most elaborate psychical activities of men as developments of elementary forms of conscious processes in the animal kingdom as a whole; the latter is a defence of the theory of natural selection against the attacks of St George Mivart, and appeared in an English edition on the suggestion of Darwin.

Lord Rayleigh had an interest in abnormal psychological investigations, and became a member and vicepresident of the Society for Psychical Research.

The simplest mental act into which we can analyse the operations of the human mind - the act of sense-perception - is never merely a change, physical or psychical, but is the consciousness of a change.

Chevreul was a determined enemy of charlatanism in every form, and a complete sceptic as to the "scientific" psychical research or spiritualism which had begun in his time (see his De la baguette divinatoire, et des tables tournantes, 1864).

Again, in his Grundproblem der Erkenntnisstheorie (1889) he uses without proof the hypothesis of psychological idealism, that we perceive psychical effects, to infer with merely hypothetical consistency the conclusion of noumenal metaphysical idealism that all we can thereby know is psychical causes, or something transcendent, beyond phenomena indeed, yet not beyond mind.

Fechner (1801-1887) affords a conspicuous instance of the idealistic tendency to mysterize nature in his Panpsychism, or that form of noumenal idealism which holds that the universe is a vast communion of spirits, souls of men, of animals, of plants, of earth and other planets, of the sun, all embraced as different members in the soul of the world, the highest spirit - God, in whom we live and move and have our being; that the bodily and the spiritual, or the physical and the psychical, are everywhere parallel processes which never meet to interact; but that the difference between them is only a difference between the outer and inner aspects of one identical psychophysical process; and yet that both sides are not equally real, because while psychical and physical are identical, the psychical is what a thing really is as seen from within, the physical is what it appears to be to a spectator outside; or spirit is the self-appearance of matter, matter the appearance of one spirit to another.

In this panpsychistic parallelism he was again like Leibnitz, and he developed his predecessor's view, that the conservation of energy prevents interaction, into the supposition that alongside the physical there is a parallel psychical conservation of energy.

Like all true followers of Kant, Riehl prefers epistemology to metaphysics; yet in reality he founds a metaphysics on epistemology, which he calls " critical realism," so far as it asserts a knowledge of things beyond phenomena, and " critical monism," so far as it holds that these things are unlike both physical and psychical phenomena, but are nevertheless the common basis of both.

But whereas Fechner and Paulsen hold that all physical processes are universally accompanied by psychical processes which are the real causes of psychical sensations, Riehl rejects this paradox of universal parallelism in order to fall into the equally paradoxical hypothesis that something or other, which is neither physical not psychical, causes both the physical phenomena of matter moving in space and the psychical phenomena of mind to arise in us as its common effects.

Though no noumenalist, in many details he is with noumenalists; with Fechner in psychophysics, in psychophysical parallelism, in the independence of the physical and the psychical chains of causality, in reducing physical and psychical to a difference of aspects, in substituting impulse for accident in organic evolution, and in wishing to recognize a gradation of individual spiritual beings; with Schopenhauer and Hartmann in voluntarism; and even with Schelling and Hegel in their endeavour, albeit on an artificial method, to bring experience under notions, and to unite subject and object in one concrete reality.

He supposes that we have no sensations of space and time, as the nativists suppose, but that, while local signs give us spatial ideas, feelings of expectation are temporal signs giving us temporal ideas, and that these ideas enter into the psychical compound, which is our actual starting-point.

Now, in order to discern this underlying truth in the various and apparently conflicting world creeds, appeal was made to a "Secret Doctrine," and "Esoteric Teaching," which Madame Blavatsky proclaimed had been held for ages as a sacred possession and trust by certain mysterious adepts in occultism, or "Mahatmas," with whom she said she was in psychical as well as in direct physical communication.

In 1882, Sir William Barrett, Henry Sidgwick and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle founded the Society for Psychical Research in order to scientifically study psychic abilities.

Learn the history of the real investigators in psychical research and parapsychology, how they've done what they've done, what they've found and what they think the phenomena is.

Lord Rayleigh had an interest in abnormal psychological investigations, and became a member and vice president of the Society for Psychical Research.

For an account of these see Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vii.

Myers in two papers published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.

See also his "Notes of Seances with D.D.Home," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vi.

Flournoy, Des Indes a la Planete Mars (Geneva, 1900; there is an English translation published in London); Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, passim.

Bethe, deny them all claim to psychical qualities.

But a profound change was' coming over him, which led him to leave the domain of physical research for that of psychical and spiritual inquiry.

The writer is acquainted with no experiments in which it was attempted to discern the future (except in trivial cases as to events on the turf, when chance coincidence might explain the successes), and only with two or three cases in which there was an attempt to help historical science and discern the past by aid of psychical methods.

His idea of applying the natural history method of classification to psychical phenomena gave scientific character to his work, the value of which was enhanced by his methodical exposition and his command of illustration.

They bear a definite relation to the structure of our physical and psychical nature, and correspond to definite needs of the subject that manifests itself therein.

The physiological and psychical aspects of sound are treated in the article Hearing.

It is suggested, then, in the light of modern psychical research, that Mephistopheles, though (as the Faust-books record) invisible to any one else, was visible enough to Faust himself and to Wagner, the famulus who shared his somnambulistic experiences.

The mere immobility of the body was sufficient to show that its state was not identical with that of waking; when, in addition, the sleeper awoke to give an account of visits to distant lands, from which, as modern psychical investigations suggest, he may even have brought back veridical details, the conclusion must have been irresistible that in sleep something journeyed forth, which was not the body.

Here, again, he went much further than Leibnitz, but along with Schelling, in identifying the physical and the psychical as outer and inner sides of the same process, in which the inner is the real and the outer the apparent.

Accordingly, he calls these and all other processes " psychophysical "; and as he recognized two parallel energies, physical and psychical, differing only as outer and inner aspects of the same energy, he called this " psychophysical energy."

At the same time Fechner would not have us suppose that the two sides are equal; according to him, the psychical, being the psychophysical as viewed from within, is real, the physical, being the psychophysical viewed from without, is apparent; so in oneself, though nervous process and psychical process are the same, it is the psychical which is the reality of which the nervous is mere appearance; and so everywhere, spirit is the reality, body the appearance of spirit to spirit.