196 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



or instances of content. Whether he deals with these questions or not 

 there is one thing that is always held to distinguish his point of view from 

 that of related scientists. He is primarily interested in the intact organism 

 or the intact mental life. For the most part he cannot cut out partial 

 responses, or special forms of content, and consider how they are con- 

 ditioned in the absence of all the rest. If he could do this it would be 

 foreign to his essential problem to make the attempt. He may, indeed, 

 gain help from a study of instances in which certain types of response have 

 been lost, leaving still a very complex organism, or mental life, to effect 

 a readjustment of what is left. This, however, is clearly a very different 

 matter from cutting out the partial response and studying that by itself. 



The tendency to try to treat partial or specific forms or response each 

 as much as possible by itself has, as I have indicated, persisted from pre- 

 experimental days, and has done much to render experiments in psychology 

 often trivial, uninteresting and highly artificial. The organism in which, 

 the psychologist is interested does not normally react with one sensory 

 modality only, or with emotion untinged by information, or with impulsive 

 activity free from interference by non-impulsive factors. All this might 

 be unimportant, if by experiment the psychologist could force his subjects 

 to adopt such simple modes of reaction. The psychologist would indeed 

 be barred from making that direct passage from the laboratory to the 

 world at large which he is very fond of making, but that would not be an 

 unmixed evil. The situation is, however, more difficult than this. The 

 subject of a psychological experiment always retains the possibility of 

 making more reactions than the one that is being specifically studied. No 

 matter how honest and painstaking both experimenter and subject may 

 be, these ' other ' reactions will play their parts in any results obtained. 

 To try to shut up a subject to a purely visual or a purely auditory reaction,, 

 to pure perceiving, pure remembering, pure imagining and the like is, in 

 fact, only to force him to utilise indirect cues so different from those which 

 he constantly employs under normal conditions as, in many cases, to make 

 his total reaction a genuinely novel one. The reaction has become 

 artificial, that is, not merely because the range of its conditions is 

 restricted, but because, with as wide a range of conditions imperfectly 

 under control as ever, many of these are specific to this special experimental 

 situation. The perfecting of objective control does not reduce the subject 

 to a single sense, or a single cognitive or emotional process, but, leaving 

 him as complex a reactive agent as ever, forces him to make up on the 

 spot a type of total reaction fitted to this special environment. 



Holding all this firmly in mind, what conclusions can we draw ? First,, 

 it follows that the experimental psychologist must claim that for the 

 present, and perhaps for always, he is as much clinician as experimenter. 

 He has not merely to arrange conditions and record results. There seems 

 to be a notion abroad that there is so much uncharted ground in psychology 

 that an investigator can do anything he pleases, and so long as he observes 

 everything possible, his results are bound to be significant. This is 

 utterly false. His observation is definitely that of a man with a problem, 

 and generally also with a personality, in Adew ; and it is by consequence 

 almost glaringly selective. He is not alone among experimenters in this 

 respect. From a reading of the theory of the matter one might be. 



