December 9, 1004.] 



SCIENCE. 



787 



all knew, of course, that the plan of ar- 

 rangement of these two yearly lists is by no 

 means the same. What I, for one, had not 

 realized was the fact that the plan of ar- 

 rangement of both is eminently unsystem- 

 atic. We use a bibliography, and find 

 it useful; we do not need to enquire 

 further regarding it. But I do not believe 

 that any psychologist, of whatever school, 

 could write a systematic psychology on the 

 lines laid down in these bibliographies. 

 This fact— if fact it is— seems worthy of 

 a passing remark; for it indicates, in a con- 

 crete and definite way, that in spite of the 

 enormous increase of our psychological 

 knowledge, within the last few decades, we 

 are still very far from any complete or 

 rounded science of psychology. I am not 

 so much disposed to blame the bibliogra- 

 phers— I take their lack of system to be 

 unavoidable— as I am to draw a long 

 breath at the amount of work which still 

 remains for us to do. 



Finding that I could not avail myself of 

 the bibliographies, I took the bull by the 

 horns, and went to the psychological jour- 

 nals. I listed and analyzed the experi- 

 mental papers in the Philosophische Stu- 

 dien, the Zeitschrift f. Psychologie, the 

 Annee psychologique, the American Jour- 

 nal of Psychology and the Psychological 

 Beview; not with any view of substituting 

 a classification of my own for the classifica- 

 tions now employed, but simply with the 

 intention of finding out what was there. 

 If you object that these five journals are 

 not coextensive with experimental psychol- 

 ogy, I must reply that they are at any rate 

 representative, and that the duration of 

 human life is limited. Even so, I am not 

 sure that the game was worth the candle. 

 I earned, perhaps, by hard work, the right 

 to stand upon this platform; but I found 

 out very little that I did not know before. 



If I am to indicate, briefly, the results of 

 this enquiry, I must premise that we are 



agreed upon the distinction, within experi- 

 mental psychology, between the properly 

 'psychological' and the psychophysical 

 attitudes. The object of the 'psycholog- 

 ical' experiment, as I am now using the 

 phrase, is introspective acquaintance with 

 the processes and formations of a given 

 consciousness. The object of the psycho- 

 physical experiment, as we have recently 

 been reminded by G. B. Miiller— I suppose 

 that we are all fresh from a reading of his 

 ' Psychophysische Methodik'— is a numer- 

 ical determination. Thus, the object of the 

 simple reaction, regarded as a psychological 

 experiment, is the introspective analysis of 

 the action consciousness, given under cer- 

 tain fixed conditions ; the object of the same 

 experiment, regarded psychophysically, is 

 the ascertainment of a representative time- 

 value and of the manner and limits of 

 its variation. Both points of view are cov- 

 ered by the general term 'experimental 

 psychology'; both types of experiment are 

 valuable ; but the two must not be con- 

 fused. If, now, we look at the contents of 

 the Philosophische Studien, the oldest es- 

 tablished of our five journals, we find that 

 three departments of experiment-al investi- 

 gation are preferred high above the rest: 

 sensation, perception and action. • There is, 

 moreover, a very definite trend towards 

 psyehophysics, so that, e. g., at least two 

 fifths of the articles that deal with sensa- 

 tion must be classed outright as psycho- 

 physical. The remaining experimental pa- 

 pers may be subsumed under the headings : 

 association of ideas, attention, feeling, 

 memory and recognition, the organic ac- 

 companiments of the mental life, the range 

 of consciousness, the processes involved in 

 the activities of reading and writing, and 

 the time consciousness. What we find in 

 the other four journals is a continuance 

 of interest in these same problems, but a 

 continuance of interest which is combined 

 with a shift of emphasis from psycho- 



