Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

Introduction

The Gestaltists, as we saw in the previous chapter, argued against the psychological atomism that was inherent in both classical empiricism, of which Titchener was the modern incarnation, and Kantianism, of which Wundt was the representative. They were not, however, the only ones to find fault with these views: William James also disagreed with atomism. His approach, however, derived not from the Aristotle-influenced descriptive psychology of Brentano but from empiricism itself. For James, as we shall see, classical empiricism of the type exemplified by the likes of Locke and Hume was simply not empiricist enough. It had claimed to be true to the facts of experience, but had failed to live up to its own principles. It had, for example, claimed that experience was made up of atomistic sensations when no such things were ever actually found in our experience. If only, thought James, empiricists had had the courage of their convictions, they would have seen that our mental life does not consist of discrete elements but is an interconnected flux. It was a more radical empiricism, one that really did try to do justice to the facts of experience, that lay at the foundation of James’s approach to psychology. The essence of this anti-atomistic approach to consciousness is exemplified in James’s central idea of the stream of consciousness.