688 EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



it is praised, sometimes decried. All this is natural. The important 

 thing for us is, I think, the recognition that the experiments are 

 a part of " experimental psychology," in the sense of this paper, and 

 must be taken account of in any general review of the problems of 

 experimental psychology. The psychologist of the laboratory is 

 apt to emphasize the crudity and roughness of the work, and its 

 neglect of introspective control; the psychologist of the clinic or 

 the school-room or the animal-room is apt to consider his colleague 

 narrow and his colleague's work finical and meticulous. The tran- 

 scending of this difference, the reconciliation of these views, I take 

 to be a very real problem for experimental psychology, though 

 a problem of a different order from those that I have been discussing. 

 And I suggest the following points for your consideration. First, 

 that one cannot be too nice or too careful in experimenting on mind. 

 There is no such thing as over-refinement of method. 1 Let those who 

 doubt this fact read Martin and Miiller's Unterschiedsempfindlichkeit ; 

 the more delicately one analyzes, the more subtle does mental pro- 

 cess reveal itself to be. Galton's questionary results on visualization 

 are psychology, and valuable psychology; but they are also pioneer 

 psychology. Now, the pioneer may pride himself on his work, but 

 not on the roughness of his work. When the laboratory psychologist 

 smiles at the charcoal sketches of objective experiment well, he 

 does wrong to smile, because honest work should not be laughed at ; 

 but he is right in his conviction that the details are all to come, and 

 that the simplification of the lines means over-hasty generalization. 

 Mind is, so to say, our common enemy; and the laboratory psycho- 

 logist learns, by dearly bought experience, not to underestimate his 

 opponent. Secondly, I would remind you that, after all, objective 

 work in psychology must always be inferential; introspection gives 

 the pattern, sets the standard, of analysis and explanation. If we 

 interpret the animal mind by the law of parsimony, our only justi- 

 fication is that introspection discovers the reign of this law in the 

 human consciousness; if we subsume the evolution of mind in the 

 animal series to the principle of natural selection, our only justi- 

 fication is, again, that introspection discovers the working of this 

 same principle in our own case. As I put it just now, there is but 

 one excuse for the neglect of introspection in psychology, and that 

 is that introspection is impossible; but even here our neglect is 

 methodical only, and does not must not extend to interpreta- 

 tion. These things have been said so often 2 that they have become 



1 A method may be too refined for the man who is using it, or for the problem 

 upon which he is immediately engaged. But these are different matters. 



2 In saying them, from the "narrower" point of view, I am, of course, hoping 

 for similar cautions (at any rate, for varied advice and information) from the 

 more "objective" psychologists. What they will have to tell their colleagues of 

 the laboratory, I do not know; but I have no doubt that it will be worth listen- 

 ing to. 



