J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 193 



and not to a and b and a relation between a and b, but to a total indivisible 

 situation only to be described as a-h-in-r elation. Again, an animal is set 

 a complex problem and typically achieves the solution suddenly ; for 

 what we call the ' correct ' solution is a reaction to the total situation as 

 built, or figured, or formed. 



Thus a fundamental psychological question tends to be : ' What is the 

 nature and what are the characteristics of these indefeasible forms or 

 patterns which stand over against all our reactions, compelling them to be 

 as they are ? ' In our answer we can easily slip into the persistent error of 

 over-emphasis of the objective side of the situation-response problem. I 

 do not say they do this, but in his doctrines of physical Gestalten Kohler 

 comes very near it. Or again, looking to the response side, we may try 

 to build up inside the responding mechanism a complex sj'^stem, somehow 

 corresponding to the integrated phenomenal situation. Then, as in 

 Kohler's theories of ionic concentration within the central nervous system, 

 we are almost sure to slip into sheer speculative physiology. Finally, the 

 phenomenological attitude seems bound to issue in a comprehensive 

 theory about the nature of the world as we know it, rather than in a scien- 

 tific study of the determination of human response. It is the latter alone 

 which is truly amenable to experimental treatment. 



There is another contemporary movement, also originating in Germany, 

 much less widely influential in other countries at the moment, but likely to 

 attract more and more attention. This springs from the work of Professor 

 E. R. Jaensch. It also has a definite experimental basis. Jaensch 

 experimentally discovered a type of imagery which seemed to lie some- 

 where between the after-sensation on the one hand and the genuine memory 

 image on the other. I cannot attempt to describe his extremely keen 

 investigation of this eidetic imagery, as he called it. At the moment the 

 main point is that he considered it demonstrable that a proneness to eidetic 

 imagery is correlated with a number of other reaction tendencies. 

 He elaborated a theory of the two-fold division of all human subjects into 

 integrate and disintegrate types. The integrate is the artistic, sjmthetic 

 type, taking everything as a whole and having an inevitable accompani- 

 ment of persistent marked temperamental qualities and tendencies. The 

 disintegrate is the scientific, analytic type, tending to split up presented 

 situations and to deal with them piecemeal, and he also has his invariable, 

 persistent, accompanying temperamental character. Of course the inte- 

 grate and the disintegrate in their most marked forms are the extremes of 

 a very wide range and pass the one into the other by very small shades of 

 difference ; but there remain these two predominant types, by a study and 

 understanding of which all the problems of human reaction, in every field 

 whatsoever, are to be finally explained. 



Now this view does certainly seem to be biological in bent, and it is being 

 explored throughout by experimental study. Moreover, it strives, and, 

 I think, successfully, to avoid that artificiality which, as we have seen, 

 hangs over conventional laboratory methods for the investigation of the 

 higher modes of human response. It rightly treats our problems as 

 problems of reaction tendencies, of their deternoination and their grouping. 

 But it does seem to be rather in a hurry with its sweeping generalisations. 

 Here are some extremely interesting observations on imagery. Why 

 1929 o 



