PROBLEMS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 685 



It is a problem for which we are not yet ripe. We can approach it 

 only by way of theories which we know to be inadequate, and by 

 help of hypotheses which we cannot substantiate by facts. But it 

 is the problem towards which we are trending, and the road to its 

 solution lies, as in my judgment all such roads in our science lie, 

 not through brilliant suggestion and ingenious forecast, but through 

 patient and steady work. This work must be in part the work of 

 experimental psychology, as we are here interpreting that phrase; 

 in part the work of what is called individual psychology though, 

 indeed, from perception onwards, the difference between these two 

 departments of psychological investigation is simply a difference of 

 accent. Or, to put the matter concretely, we must work not only 

 with the doctrine of states of consciousness, comparing experi- 

 mentally the attentive and the inattentive, the hypnotic and the 

 dreaming, all sorts of normal and abnormal states of consciousness, 

 but also with the doctrine of conscious types which we owe (and 

 the debt is great) to the psychologists of individual variation. 



So I finish the first part of my review. If I have omitted anything 

 of consequence, or if I have seemed to do injustice to any depart- 

 ment of work, I must ask for pardon and correction; I have spoken 

 with the utmost possible brevity. My own habitual thought in 

 experimental psychology is positive, not negative; that is, I am 

 accustomed to look upon our problems rather as continuations of 

 work already begun than as gaps and lacunae in our system of 

 knowledge. I could wish that it had fallen to my lot to address you 

 in this positive way, to show what experimental psychology has 

 done, how in the past few decades it has changed the face of system- 

 atic psychology, rather than to insist upon the tasks that still lie 

 before it. I have, however, tried to be entirely honest; I have, I think, 

 rather exaggerated than concealed our deficiencies; and I would 

 have you remember that this definite formulation of things to do 

 presupposes and implies that much has been done. When Wundt 

 wrote his famous essay, Ueber die Aufgaben dcr experimentcllcn 

 Psychologic, the problems that loomed before him were the psycho- 

 physics of sensation, the analysis of perception, the time- relations 

 of the higher processes. To-day, the list is longer and the range 

 wider. But it is only because we already possess that we can say, 

 in such detail, what still needs to be added to our possessions: in 

 which fact let us take encouragement. 



I pass, with some diffidence, to a consideration of wider issues, 



of those extensions of the experimental method, proposed or 



attempted, of which I spoke at the beginning of this address. Most 



psychologists, I take it, would agree that the picture I have drawn 



of experimental psychology in what has preceded is drawn too 



