Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World.

by Warren Hilton.

CHAPTER I

THE TWO FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES OF MIND

[Sidenote: _Mind as a Means to Achievement_]

In the preceding book, "Psychology and Achievement," we established the truth of two propositions:

I. _All human achievement comes about through bodily activity._

II. _All bodily activity is caused, controlled and directed by the mind._

To these two fundamental propositions we now append a third, which needs no proof, but follows as a natural and logical conclusion from the other two:

III. _The Mind is the instrument you must employ for the accomplishment of any purpose._

[Sidenote: _Three Postulates for this Course_]

With these three fundamental propositions as postulates, it will be the end and aim of this Course of Reading to develop plain, simple and specific methods and directions for the most efficient use of the mind in the attainment of practical ends.

_To comprehend these mental methods and to make use of them in business affairs you must thoroughly understand the two fundamental processes of the mind._

These two fundamental processes are the Sense-Perceptive Process and the Judicial Process.

The Sense-Perceptive Process is the process by which knowledge is acquired through the senses. Knowledge is the result of experience and all human experience is made up of sense-perceptions.

[Sidenote: _Experience and Abstractions_]

The Judicial Process is the reasoning and reflective process. It is the purely "intellectual" type of mental operation. It deals wholly in abstractions. Abstractions are constructed out of past experiences.

Consequently, the Sense-Perceptive Process furnishes the raw material, sense-perceptions or experience, for the machinery of the Judicial Process to work with.

[Sidenote: _Primary Mental Operations_]

In this book we shall give you a clear idea of the Sense-Perceptive Process and show you some of the ways in which an understanding of this process will be useful to you in everyday affairs. The succeeding book will explain the Judicial Process.

CHAPTER II

SENSATIONS AND OUR PERCEPTION OF THEM

[Sidenote: _Mind's Source of Supplies_]

Whatever you know or think you know, of the external world comes to you through some one of your five primary senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, or some one of the secondary senses, such as the muscular sense and the sense of heat and cold.

The impressions you receive in this way may be true or they may be false. They may const.i.tute absolute knowledge or they may be merely mistaken impressions. Yet, such as they are, they const.i.tute all the information you have or can have concerning the world about you.

[Sidenote: _Does Matter Exist?_]

Philosophers have been wrangling for some thousands of years as to whether we have any real and absolute knowledge, as to whether matter actually does or does not exist, as to the reliability or unreliability of the impressions we receive through the senses.

But there is one thing that all scientific men are agreed upon, and that is that such knowledge as we do possess comes to us by way of perception through the organs of sense.

If you have never given much thought to this subject, you have naturally a.s.sumed that you have direct knowledge of all the material things that you _seem_ to perceive about you. It has never occurred to you that there are intervening physical agencies that you ought to take into account.

[Sidenote: _First-Hand Knowledge_]

When you look up at the clock, you instinctively feel that there is nothing interposed between it and your mind that is conscious of it.

You seem to feel that your mind reaches out and envelops it.

As a matter of fact, your sense impression of that bit of furniture must filter through a great number of intervening physical agencies before you can become conscious of it.

Direct perception of an outside reality is impossible.

[Sidenote: _Second-Hand Knowledge_]

Before you can become aware of any object there must first arise between it and your mind a chain of countless distinct physical events.

Modern science tells us that light is due to undulations or wave-like vibrations of the ether, sound to those of the air, etc.

These vibrations are transmitted from one particle of ether or air to another, and so from the thing perceived to the body of man.

Think, then, what crisscross of air currents and confusion of ether vibrations, what myriad of physical events, must intervene between any distant object and your own body before sensations come and bring a consciousness of that object's existence!

Nor can you be sure, even after any particular vibration has reached the surface of your body, that it will reach your mind unaltered and intact!

[Sidenote: _Etheric Vibrations as Causing Sensations_]

What goes on in the body itself is made clear by your knowledge of the cellular structure of man.

You know that you have a system of nerves centering in the brain and with countless ramifications throughout the structural tissues of the body.

You know that part of these nerves are sensory nerves and part of them are motor nerves. You know that the sensory nerves convey to the brain the impressions received from the outer world and that the motor nerves relay this information to the rest of the body coupled with commands for appropriate muscular action.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DIAGRAM SHOWING THE FOUR CHIEF a.s.sOCIATION CENTERS OF THE HUMAN BRAIN]

[Sidenote: _The Road to Perception_]

The outer end of every sensory nerve exposes a sensitive bit of gray matter. These sensitive, impression-receiving ends const.i.tute together what is called the "sensorium" of the body.

When vibrations of light or sound impinge upon the sensorium, they are relayed from nerve cell to nerve cell until they reach the central brain. Then it is, and not until then, that sensations and perceptions occur.

Consider, now, the infinitesimal size of a nerve cell and you will have some conception of the number of hands through which the message must pa.s.s before it is received by the central office.