J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 197 



tempted to suppose that the best experimenter, once the experiment is 

 arranged, would be merely a rather complicated and delicate recording and 

 calculating device. Those who have a reputation for brilliant experimental 

 work in any field singularly fail to impress this character upon the 

 intelligent and sympathetic onlooker. Anybody who, by experiment, is 

 going to discover anything important about the determination of human 

 reactions, must first have developed a certain character of human reaction 

 for himself. If this is to be used against him when he claims validity for 

 his discoveries, it is a sort of stone he can return with some effect, whoever 

 his opponents may be. 



Yet it is extraordinarily important that the experimental psychologist 

 should not be exclusively concentrated upon the particular reaction 

 which he is specifically studying. Just because it is the intact subject, 

 the intact organism, that we are concerned with the conditions of any 

 reaction are apt to branch widely. The problem for us, for example, is not 

 to find out how the eye sees or the ear hears, but how the animal and man 

 do. No doubt we can answer this problem only in an imperfect way, but 

 it takes us no nearer perfection to cut the ear or the eye out of the man. 

 This is true with increasing force as we go higher in the level of response. 

 Indirect cues are neither to be ignored, nor to be cut out, but definitely 

 to be studied. 



Secondly, no experimental psychologist must profess, with unvarying 

 belief, the dogma of constancy of objective conditions. If, biologically 

 speaking, human reactions had been built up to meet a series of unchanging 

 environments emphatic insistence upon rigidity of conditions would be 

 justifiable. Obviously, they are not so built. So far as the psychologist 

 is concerned, many of the most important characters that dominantly set 

 the course of our reactions belong directly to the organism with which he 

 is dealing, to its immediate and remote past history and to its present 

 specific and general state of adaptation. These intra-organic, or intra- 

 subjective factors may be more diversified by rigidity than by variation 

 of outward circumstance. Of course, I do not argue that the experimental 

 psychologist need not be seriously concerned with constancy of experimental 

 procedure. He must arrange this as carefully as possible, taking advan- 

 tage of whatever may be known as to the order of importance of the 

 elements of any complex situation with which he is concerned. But he 

 should never hesitate to break this constancy of procedure if his psycho- 

 logical judgment or insight assures him that a diversity of outward 

 circumstances will best secure a relative stability of attitude in his 

 observer. To the experimenter who is not a psychologist this claim may 

 appear arbitrary and arrogant. There is, so far as I can see, no help for 

 that. 



In the third place, the position which I have stated carries with it that 

 the experimental psychologist, at the end of his studies, has to be satisfied 

 with indicating trends, directions, proclivities rather than dogmatic laws. 

 His phenomena are essentially biological, in process of development, 

 displaying no hard and fast boundaries anywhere. He may formulate 

 dogmatic laws, and use experiments as imperfect illustrations ; but this 

 is the wrong order of things, though it has been by far the commonest and 

 is still the easiest. 



