FACULTY (Lat. facultas, ability, from fa.
easy, from facere, to do). A term used gen erally in psychology to denote any sort of mental function. Specifically the name 'faculty psychol ogy-' is applied to a psychological school which has its typical representative in Christian Wolff and its most renowned expositor in Immanuel Kant (q.v.). Its mode of procedure is to take the functional terms in common use (feeling, per ception, understanding, memory, imagination, etc.), and by logical process to reduce them to some one, two, or three principal faculties. to which the others are then subsumed as subordinate faculties. The mind thus appears as constituted of certain powers or potentialities, which are real ized in the individual eases of remembering, thinking, etc. Wolff himself recognizes two prin cipal faculties—knowledge and desire—though he endeavors to unify them in a single supreme faculty of representation. The lower faculty of knowledge includes sense. imagination. the poetic faculty, and memory; the higher includes at tention, reflect ion, and understanding. The lower faculty of desire, again, comprises pleasantness and unpleasantness, sense desires and aversions, and emotion; the higher includes volition, posi tive and negative, and freedom. Kant adopts a threefold classification of mental phenomena, though he subordinates all the mental powers to the faculty of knowledge ('understanding,' in the wider sense). This eomprises (1) understanding in the narrower sense, which is legislative for knowing; (2) ren !AIM, which is legislative for time faculty of desire; and (31 judgment. which legis lates for feeling. Knowledge is further divided into a lower or receptive faculty of sense, and a higher or active faculty of understanding.
It it clear that a psychology based on these principles of classification can never pass the bounds of superficial description. It makes no effort to analyze mental processes ; and the powers or functions which it. discriminates have no biological or genetic sanction. INhireover, there is always the danger that a classificatory term, such as 'memory,' shall be raised to the rank of an explanatory principle. substantialized or hypostatized; in which case superficiality is changed to serious error. lt does no harm to group together all the facts of remembering and forgetting, under a general class-term `memoryz' such grouping may, indeed, be as serving to bring all the relevant facts before tne psycholo gist's attention. 13111. if we go further, and pro ceed to account for a given fact of remembering by appeal to the mind's power of memory, we have involved ourselves in a vicious circle. It is one of De•bart's great merits that (1) by insisting on the need of starting psychological investigation from the given facts and not from possibilities which the facts are supposed to realize, and (2) by emphasizing the abstract and purely classifi catory nature of the faculty concepts, he removed a powerful and growing abuse. and paved the way for the more rigorous and scientific methods of modern psychology. The service is all the great er, since 'popular' psychology is, in the nature of things, a faculty psychology, and the doctrines of the latter are therefore peculiarly insidious. Consult: Ilerbart, Werke, ed. by von Kehrbach (Leipzig. 1882) ; Wundt, Physiologisehe Psycho logic' (Leipzig, 1893) ; Titchener, Experimental Psyehology (New York, 1901).