A Beginner's Psychology

British author Edward Titchener's introductory psychology book (first published in 1915) is a text the author himself would have found useful when beginning his own study of the subject some 30 years earlier. It was a paragraph in James Mill, the "most unpsychological of psychologists," that set him on this introspective track and Titchener aims to saved his readers (in his words" "a great deal of labour and vexation of spirit." While there is an inordinately long introduction, Titchener is hoping the reader learns to be clear and definite in his objections, realising his own point of view, and sticking to it in working out later his own psychological system. Each chapter comes with a list of questions, testing the reader's understanding of what he has just read, and supplemented with a list of References for further reading (confined to works available in the English language). Titchener avoids the term 'consciousness.' a word he feels is slippery and better discarded.