22 REPORT— 1893. 



followed, and why physiologists have been unwilling to enter on it. The 

 study of the less complicated internal relations of the organism has 

 afforded so many difficult problems that the most difficult of all have 

 been deferred ; so that although the psycho-physical method was initiated 

 by E. H. Weber in the middle of the present century, by investigations ' 

 which formed part of the work done at that epoch of discovery, and 

 although Professor Wnndt, also a physiologist, has taken a larger share in 

 the more recent development of the new study, it is chiefly by psycho- 

 logists that the researches which have given to it its importance as a new 

 discipline have been conducted. 



Although, therefore, experimental psychology has derived its methods 

 from physical science, the result has been not so much that ^physiologists 

 have become philosophers, as that philosophers have become experimental 

 psychologists. In our own universities, in those of America, and still 

 more in those of Germany, psychological students of mature age are to 

 be found who are willing to place themselves in the dissecting-room side 

 by side with beginners in anatomy, in order to acquire that exact know- 

 ledge of the framework of the oi-ganism without which no man can 

 understand its working. Those, therefore, who are apprehensive lest the 

 regions of mind should be invaded by the insaniens sainentia of the 

 laboratory, may, I think, console themselves with the thought that the 

 invaders are for the most part men who before they became laboratory 

 workers had already given their allegiance to philosophy ; their purpose 

 being not to relinquish definitively, but merely to lay aside for a time, 

 the weapons in the use of which they had been trained, in order to learn 

 the use of ours. The motive that has encouraged them has not been any 

 hope of finding an experimental solution of any of the ultimate problems 

 of philosophy, but the conviction that, inasmuch as the relation between 

 mental stimuli and the mental processes which they awaken is of the 

 same order with the relation between every other vital process and its 

 specific determinant, the only hope of ascertaining its nature must lie in 

 the employment of the same methods of comparative measurement which 

 the biologist uses for similar purposes. Not that there is necessarily 

 anything scientific in mere measurement, but that measurement affords 

 the only means by which it can be determined whether or not the same 

 conformity in the relation between stimulus and reaction which we have 

 accepted as the fundamental characteristic of life, is also to be found in 

 mind, notwithstanding that mental processes have no known physical 

 concomitants. The results of experimental psychology tend to show 

 that it is so, and consequently that in so far the processes in question are 

 as truly functions of organism as the contraction of a muscle, or as the 

 changes produced in the retinal pigment by light. 



I will make no attempt even to enumerate the special lines of inquiry 



' Weber's researches were published in Wagner's Handrvorterhucli , I think, ir» 

 1849, 



