Ai GIST 28, 1003.] 



SCIENCE. 



205 



owu retiua. Sufh people never become in- 

 vestigators. 



To some other people, on the other hand, 

 every break in the continuity of our knowl- 

 edge is a distressing thing ; merely to state 

 a problem is to call into being a center of 

 unrest. Our investigator manifestly is of 

 this type. He looks at the world as in a 

 broken mirror, full of irregular gaps and 

 distortions, every one of which is to him 

 more or less painful. We can not there- 

 fore speak of the resting stage of his con- 

 sciousness as in perfectly stable equi- 

 librium. 



II. In this condition he receives some 

 impression— let us say, to take an illustra- 

 tion from my own recent experience, a 

 peculiar movement of the catfish hitherto 

 unobserved— which serves to dii-ect atten- 

 tion to some one of these tender spots of 

 consciousness, in other words, to some bio- 

 logical problem. The known facts bearing 

 on that problem become focalized in the 

 investigator's mind,' and that which wa.s 

 before a consciousness in relatively stable 

 equilibrium becomes a tensional system in 

 very unstable equilibrium— it becomes, in 

 fact, at-tention. 



Our student has now selected his prob- 

 lem, let us say the function of certain 

 cutaneous sense organs upon the barblets 

 of the catfish, the stimulation of which he 

 supposes may have occasioned the peculiar 

 movement above referred to. 



We are in the habit of saying that the 

 'research' now begins; as a matter of fact 

 the research is already well under way. 

 Well begun may be more than half done in 

 this case. The meaning of the problem 

 and the value of its solution will be deter- 

 mined by the character of the initial ten- 

 sional system, and this in turn rests upon 

 the investigator's wealth of mental con- 

 tent in what I have called the prodromic 

 stage— in common parlance, upon his 



jireparation for research. The observed 

 fact in the beginning would have sug- 

 gested no problem unless his previous fund 

 of experience had permitted a. prophetic 

 insight into its meaning— 'in-sight' as dis- 

 tinguished from 'at-sight,' or the meaning- 

 less gaze of the untutored mind, to use a 

 happy antithesis of Dr. Paul Carus.* 



III. Now, tension means dis-harmony. 

 The solution of the problem involves the 

 release of this particular tension in con- 

 sciousness and the return to equilibrium, 

 or the correlation of the new fact observed 

 with the preexisting body of fact. The 

 probability is that this can not be done 

 directly; they do not fit together. The 

 student now proceeds to accumulate new 

 facts suggested by those already known, 

 with the expectation of being able finally 

 to complete the system, effect the correla- 

 tion, and so relieve the tension. This is 

 observation and experiment. 



His fish, to return to our illustration, is 

 placed under experimental conditions and 

 its reactions noted under a great variety 

 of modes of stimulation, the observer's 

 mind being always alert for an observation 

 which correlates with facts previously 

 noted. 



IV. This process involves the dissocia- 

 tion so far as possible of fact and meaning, 

 of observation and interpretation, and 

 this dissociation in consciousness of things 

 whicli in nature actually belong together 

 is the tension. The facts must be objec- 

 tified, personal equation must be elimi- 

 nated or allowed for, prejudice avoided, 

 and when the series of facts as thus ob- 

 jectified is sufficiently complete so that 

 fact hangs with fact and the whole forms 

 a natural unit, then the interpretative 

 series (which in the first place set the direc- 

 tion of the research) again becomes 

 dominant, fact and interpretation fit to- 



• In the ' Primer of Philosophy.' Cf. the ' in- 

 tuition' IS. ' at-tuition ' of Lanrie. 



