PSYCHOLOGY ANR TESTIMONY 469 



evidence of his senses. Most of the examples dwelt upon by Professor 

 Miinsterberg are simply proofs of the want of skill of his students — 

 and of most persons — in making certain kinds of numerical estimates. 

 This is interesting, and even important; but it has no such range of 

 bearing as Professor Miinsterberg seems to impute to it. And unfor- 

 tunately in the only instances in which the verdict called for turned 

 on an immediate sense-perception, the subject-matter chosen was of 

 such a character as greatly to reduce the significance of the result. To 

 ask whether a bit of blue paper or a bit of gray paper is the darker is 

 to ask a technical question; the plain man simply can not put himself 

 into the proper attitude of mind to dissociate the question of color from 

 that of illumination, and the most natural conclusion from the failure 

 of a number of Professor Miinsterberg's students to answer the ques- 

 tion correctly is that they had not succeeded in training themselves to 

 that special task. The other case of direct perception is open to a 

 similar objection. Professor Miinsterberg " asked the class to describe 

 fhe sound they would hear and to say from what source it came. The 

 sound which I produced was the tone of a large tuning-fork, which I 

 struck with a little hammer below the desk, invisibly to the students. 

 Among the hundred students whose papers I examined for this record 

 were exactly two who recognized it as a tuning-fork tone. All the 

 other judgments took it for a bell, or an organ-pipe, or a muffled gong, 

 or a brazen instrument, or a horn, or a 'cello string, or a violin, and 

 so on. Or they compared it with as different noises as the growl of a 

 lion, a steam whistle, a fog-horn, a fly-wheel, a human song, and what 

 not." What does this show but that to the habitual thoughts of a great 

 majority of the men the tuning-fork is highly unfamiliar? Otherwise 

 nothing but diabolical perversity could have caused 98 out of 100 of 

 the men to declare that some other instrument had produced the sound. 

 When driven to a guess as "to what some highly unfamiliar object is 

 whose existence is announced to one of our senses, we do the best we 

 can under the circumstances; but this is something quite different from 

 what we habitually do under ordinary circumstances. I know of a 

 teacher who, whenever his entire class did phenomenally badly in 

 answering a particular examination question, inferred not that the class 

 was stupid, but that the question was an unfair one. 



While, then, nothing can be more certain than that great clangers 

 lurk in the possibilities of malobservation, I think I have shown that 

 the case of the average man is by no means as bad as an uncritical 

 acceptance of the specific charges against him so formidably presented 

 by Professor Miinsterberg would lead one to believe. One of them falls 

 down completely; most of the others relate to matters that are uni- 

 versally recognized to be matters of estimate or conjecture, and yet are 

 used by Professor Miinsterberg as though bearing with full force on 

 the question of the reliability of ordinary simple observation ; and even 



