684 EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



the higher processes are jejune and meager. To the former charge 

 I plead guilty, in so far as we have avoided the affective problems, 

 though this neglect is not at all what the framers of the accusation 

 have in mind. And even so, I might offer in extenuation the experi- 

 mental work upon attention. But this apart, I think that experi- 

 mental psychology is justified in its choice of topics. The only way 

 to catch the higher intellectual processes in course of formation is to 

 work from the periphery, by way of the sense-organs. It is when we 

 are working with tones, or with lifted weights, that the amazing 

 diversity and complexity of judgment becomes apparent. If, on 

 the contrary, we take any one of these higher processes full-formed, 

 and attack it directly, we are very likely to find that the vehicle of 

 the mental function is extremely simple; there is a law of reduction, 

 running all through mind, whereby a highly complex formation 

 tends to degenerate, to reduce to a stereotyped simplicity. It is, to 

 my mind, a distinct merit of experimental psychology that it has 

 brought to light this meagerness of content in the examination of 

 "higher" mental functions of an habitual order; and it is a healthy 

 instinct that sends us back and back again to the channels of sense, 

 as we seek an appreciation of the fullness and richness of the mental 

 life. I may add, though I say this a little hesitatingly, as a merely 

 personal impression, that the introspective attitude of the observer 

 seems to me to be more nearly normal, less artificial, in cases where 

 the avowed object of experimentation is comparatively simple. 

 If you are asked overtly to grapple with a complex psychosis, you 

 are likely to brace yourself to the task, to put on an armor of pre- 

 conceived opinion; if the psychosis meets you unawares, finds you 

 off guard, the facts will have their own way with you. A distinguished 

 English psychologist once declared that it is futile to attempt the 

 problems of recognition by way of rotating disks of black and 

 white sectors. I should say, on the contrary, that these disks are, 

 in principle, the very best means to an understanding of the higher 

 intellectual formations. 



As for the ultimate goal of experimental endeavor, I suppose 

 that we may call it (10) the problem of consciousness, not in the 

 sense in which that problem is understood by the theorist of know- 

 ledge, but in this sense: that, as hitherto we have analyzed and 

 traced to their conditions certain mental processes of lesser or higher 

 degrees of complication, so now we analyze and trace to their con- 

 ditions total consciousnesses, given in varying states and constituted 

 of various formations. The difficulty of this problem is enormous. 

 Only those of you who have attempted it, in one case or other, for 

 yourselves, who have discarded classificatory terms, and faced the 

 living facts; only these, even of experimental psychologists by 

 profession and training, can form any proper idea of its difficulty. 



