676 EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



tion, regarded as a psychological experiment, is the introspective 

 analysis of the action-consciousness, given under certain fixed 

 conditions; the object of the same experiment, regarded psycho- 

 physically, is the ascertainment of a representative time-value 

 and of the manner and limits of its variation. Both points of view 

 are covered by the general term " experimental psychology"; both 

 types of experiment are valuable; but the two must not be con- 

 fused. If, now, we look at the contents of the Philosophische Stu- 

 dien, the oldest established of our five journals, we find that three 

 departments of experimental investigation are preferred high 

 above the rest: sensation, perception, and action. There is, more- 

 over, a very definite trend toward psycho-physics, so that, e. g., 

 at least two fifths of the articles that deal with sensation must be 

 classed outright as psycho-physical. The remaining experimental 

 papers may be subsumed under the headings: association of ideas, 

 attention, feeling, memory and recognition, the organic accom- 

 paniments of the mental life, the range of consciousness, the pro- 

 cesses involved in the activities of reading and writing, and the 

 time-consciousness. What we find in the other four journals is a 

 continuance of interest in these same problems, but a continu- 

 ance of interest which is combined with a shift of emphasis from 

 psycho-physics to psychology, and a widening of the area of ex- 

 perimental work. Thus in the Studien there are about twice as 

 many articles on sensation, psychological, and psycho-physical, 

 as there are on perception; in the American Journal, the articles 

 on perception are more numerous than those on sensation; in the 

 Psychological Review there are, roughly, three articles on percep- 

 tion for every two on sensation, while the strictly psycho-physical 

 papers may almost be counted upon the fingers of one hand; and 

 the Annee psychologique, if I have counted aright, has practically 

 as many articles on memory as it has on perception, and more of 

 either than it has on sensation, while the spirit of the work has, 

 from the first, been adverse to psycho-physics. Or again, the con- 

 tents of the American Journal may, with some manipulation, be 

 brought under the same headings that served for the Studien, save 

 that one additional caption must be made for studies of voluntary 

 movement (other than reactions) and of the experiences of effort 

 and fatigue; while those of the Zeitschrift and the Psychological 

 Review require at any rate three or four new rubrics, to cover work 

 done upon mental inhibitions, the process of learning, motor auto- 

 matisms and motor dispositions, habit, etc. I do not wish to labor 

 this point, even if I must leave it with some sense of injustice to 

 the periodicals under review. You know, without my telling you, 

 and I knew, without going to the magazines, that the course of 

 experimental psychology in recent years has been away from 



