680 EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



mograph, and especially the pneumograph, hold out better hope; 

 but I doubt if, at the best, a differentiation of affective qualities 

 is to be expected from them. From the method of suggestion, 

 which really takes us over into social psychology, I expect still 

 less. There remains, at present, only the method of impression, 

 which has done good service in a limited field, and which should 

 be capable of modification and expansion. However, I am fortun- 

 ately not called upon here to propose methods of work, but only 

 to indicate problems. And the facts and laws of the affective life, 

 the life of feeling and emotion, form one of the largest and one of 

 the most insistent problems of modern experimental psychology. 



(3) Attention. The prominence given to the state of attention 

 is characteristic of experimental psychology, as contrasted with 

 the empirical psychology of associationism. It is, indeed, one of 

 Wundt's greatest services to the new psychology that he early 

 divined the cardinal importance of attention in the psychological 

 system, and began that series of experiments of which we can by 

 no means see the end to-day. For I imagine that we must all admit, 

 if we are honest with ourselves, that the body of facts at our dis- 

 posal, large and varied as it is, is yet not adequate to a theory of 

 the attentive state. We must know more of the constitution of 

 the attentive consciousness, and of the mechanism of distraction; 

 much remains to be done before we can settle the vexed questions 

 of the distribution of attention; we must work out, experimentally, 

 the relation of attention to affective process; even the familiar prob- 

 lems of the range and duration of the attentive state are well, are 

 still problems. I am not sure that we shall not have to manifold 

 the study of attention, as we have that of memory; and to speak 

 in future of the facts and laws of visual attention, auditory atten- 

 tion, and so on, instead of taking " attention " as a single state. I 

 am certain that we must have a more specialized psychology of 

 the great variants and resultants of attention a specialized 

 psychology of expectation and habituation, of practice and fatigue. 



If, then, I have seized the situation correctly, we have in these 

 three fundamental departments of psychology three problems of 

 different orders, the solution of which calls for a diverse endow- 

 ment of psychological skill and insight. There is an outlying group 

 of sensations that can, we must believe, be successfully attacked 

 by the analytic methods which have been successfully employed 

 in the other sense departments. The experimental study of the 

 affective processes calls for a much greater gift of originality and 

 constructive imagination; we have to shake off literature and 

 tradition, and to begin almost at the beginning. In the case of 

 attention, we have to push on and make progress along paths 

 already marked out, but insufficiently explored. 



