Mary Whiton Calkins Quotes on Mind
Mary Whiton Calkins's The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (1907) and the parallel two-volume Introduction to Psychology (1901) defended an explicit personalist self-psychology against the rising behaviorist and elementarist tendencies of her period. The framework treats the conscious self — given immediately and undeniably in introspection as the unifying subject of every experience — as the basic explanatory category of psychological science, with the consequent rejection of approaches that begin from sensations, behaviors, or neural events and attempt to construct the self from them. Calkins's invention of the paired-associates method gave experimental psychology one of its most enduring memory paradigms.
Quotes
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Attributed to Mary Whiton Calkins:
“The self is the most fundamental category of psychology.”
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Attributed to Mary Whiton Calkins:
“Personalist idealism takes selves as the only finally real beings.”
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“Consciousness is always self-consciousness.”
A First Book in Psychology (3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan. 1917. p. 1. (1st edition, 1909) -
Attributed to Mary Whiton Calkins:
“To study a person is the highest task of philosophy.”
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“All psychologists would agree to define their subject, at least in an introductory way, as the science of consciousness . But this definition is not enlightening unless its terms are thoroughly understood, and we must at once, therefore, proceed to discuss the nature of a science.”
An Introduction to Psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Macmillan. 1908. p. 3. (1st edition, 1901) -
“Any serious attempt to define and to classify forms of consciousness will act as a "red flag" waved in the face of many critics. The effort to define accurately and to classify in any detail is bound, they will urge, to result in a conservative clinging to conclusions once reached and in a love of schedules and schemes for their own sake. The system maker, they will insist, is likely to subordinate the facts to his classification and to cut down the truth to the measure of his framework.”
(1907) . "Psychology: What is it About?". The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 4 (25): 673–683. DOI : 10.2307/2011639 .