PROGRESS IN EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



been so often likened. An electric current would flash 

 half-way round the globe while a nervous impulse could 

 travel the length of the human body from a man's foot 

 to his brain. 



The tendency to bridge the gulf that hitherto had 

 separated the physical from the psychical world was 

 further evidenced in the following decade by Helmholtz's 

 remarkable but highly technical study of the sensations 

 of sound and of color in connection with their physical 

 causes, in the course of which he revived the doctrine 

 of color vision which that other great physiologist and 

 physicist, Thomas Young, had advanced half a century 

 before. The same tendency was further evidenced by 

 the appearance, in 1852, of Dr. Hermann Lotze's famous 

 Medizinische Psychologic, oder Physiologie der Seele, 

 with its challenge of the old myth of a " vital force." 

 But the most definitive expression of the new movement 

 was signalized in 1860, when Gustav Fechner published 

 his classical work called Psychophysik. That title in- 

 troduced a new word into the vocabulary of science. 

 Fechner explained it by saying, "I mean by psycho- 

 physics an exact theory of the relation between spirit 

 and body, and, in a general way, between the physical 

 and the psychic worlds." The title became famous, and 

 the brunt of many a controversy. So also did another 

 phrase which Fechner introduced in the course of his 

 book the phrase " physiological psychology." In mak- 

 ing that happy collocation of words Fechner virtually 

 christened a new science. 



The chief purport of this classical book of the German 

 psycho-physiologist was the elaboration and explication 

 of experiments based on a method introduced more than 

 twenty years earlier by his countryman E. H. "Weber, but 



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