PROBLEMS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 675 



In approaching this question of the problems of experimental 

 psychology, it seemed to me that the surest key to the future lay 

 in the accomplishment of the past. The best way to find out what 

 experimental psychology has to do is, I thought, to make certain 

 of what it has already done. With this idea in mind, I naturally 

 had recourse to our bibliographies, the American bibliography 

 of the Psychological Review, and the German of the Zeitschrift f. 

 Psychologic. The result was not encouraging. We all knew, of 

 course, that the plan of arrangement of these two yearly lists is by 

 no means the same. What I, for one, had not realized was the fact 

 that the plan of arrangement of both is eminently unsystematic. 

 We use a bibliography, and find it useful; we do not need to inquire 

 further regarding it. But I do not beb'eve that any psychologist, 

 of whatever school, could write a systematic psychology on the 

 lines laid down in these bibliographies. This fact if fact it is - 

 seems worthy of a passing remark; for it indicates, in a concrete 

 and definite way, that in spite of the enormous increase of our 

 psychological knowledge, within the last few decades, we are still 

 very far from any complete or rounded science of psychology. 

 I am not so much disposed to blame the bibliographers I take 

 their lack of system to be unavoidable as I am to draw a long 

 breath at the amount of work which still remains for us to do. 



Finding that 1 could not avail myself of the bibliographies, I 

 took the bull by the horns, and went to the psychological journals. 

 I listed and analyzed the experimental papers in the Philosophische 

 Studien, the Zeitschrift /. Psychologie, the Annee psychologique, the 

 American Journal of Psychology, and the Psychological Review; not 

 with any view of substituting a classification of my own for the 

 classifications now employed, but simply with the intention of finding 

 out what was there. If you object that these five journals are not 

 coextensive with experimental psychology, I must reply that they 

 are at any rate representative, and that the duration of human life 

 is limited. Even so, I am not sure that the game was worth the 

 candle. I earned, perhaps, by hard work, the right to stand upon 

 this platform; but I found out very little that I did not know before. 



If I am to indicate, briefly, the results of this inquiry, I must 

 premise that we are agreed upon the distinction, within experi- 

 mental psychology, between the properly " psychological " and 

 the psycho-physical attitudes. The object of the " psychological " 

 experiment, as I am now using the phrase, is introspective ac- 

 quaintance with the processes and formations of a given conscious- 

 ness. The object of the psycho-physical experiment, as we have 

 recently been reminded by G. E. Miiller, I suppose that we are 

 all fresh from a reading of his Psychophysische Mcthodik, is 

 a numerical determination. Thus, the object of the simple reac- 



