PROBLEMS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 687 



spective psychology, it is quick, it is easy, it is often showy. We 

 have been a little bit corrupted by the early interest in psycho- 

 physics; or perhaps, more truly, we have not all learned instinctively 

 to distinguish between psycho- physics and psychology proper; and 

 so we are apt to take the tables and curves of reactions for psycho- 

 logical results, and the inferences from them for psychological laws. 

 Now the results, where they are not purely physiological or anthro- 

 pometrical, are psycho-physical results. As such, they have their 

 usefulness; and the psychological laboratory is their right place of 

 origin. But there is no reason why one should gain psychological 

 credit for them still less for erecting a speculative psychology 

 upon their foundation. This mode of psychologizing is inherently 

 as vicious as any of the constructive modes of the older psychology, 

 the psychology before experiment. Historically, it has proved dis- 

 astrous; 1 it falsifies problems and obscures real issues; we must set 

 our faces against it now and for all time. How, indeed, shall one call 

 a man a psychologist who deliberately turns his back upon the one 

 psychological method, in the one field to which that method directly 

 applies? There is no excuse, in psychology, for the neglect of in- 

 trospection, save the one and that must be demonstrated that 

 introspection is impossible. 



Having said this much by way of preface, I may take up the 

 further question. We can hardly open a magazine nowadays without 

 finding applications of the experimental method beyond the limits 

 of the normal, adult, human mind. In animal psychology, in child 

 psychology, in various departments of mental pathology, the experi- 

 mental method is employed. Even the conservative Studien con- 

 tains articles on the state of sleep and dreaming, and Wundt has 

 looked more favorably upon experiments under hypnosis, since they 

 promise to confirm his theory of feeling. Experiments on children 

 and animals have for some years past occupied the attention of 

 leading American psychologists; work on child psychology is char- 

 acteristic of the Annee psychologique, and is being published more 

 and more freely by the Zeitschrift; you all know the avowed pur- 

 pose of Kraepelin's Arbeiten. I need not multiply references. 

 Wherever psychological interest has gone, in these fields, the experi- 

 mental method has gone with it. Sometimes the particular experi- 

 ment is borrowed forthright from the normal practice of the labora- 

 tory, sometimes the procedure has been recast to suit the novel 

 problem; sometimes the experimental method is taken seriously, 

 employed with care and knowledge, sometimes it is thrown in as 

 a makeweight, without responsibility or understanding; sometimes 



1 Is proof needed? Think of the early work upon the just noticeable difference, 

 upon the simple reaction, upon the "time-sense;" or think of Wundt's current 

 discussion of Weber's and Merkel's laws! 



