December 9, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



791 



facts at our disposal, large and varied as it 

 is, is yet not adequate to a theory of the 

 attentive state. We must know more of 

 the constitution of the attentive conscious- 

 ness, and of the mechanism of distraction ; 

 much remains to be done before we can 

 settle the vexed questions of the distribu- 

 tion of attention ; we must work out, ex- 

 perimentally, the relation of attention to 

 affective process; even the familiar prob- 

 lems of the range and duration of the at- 

 tentive state are — well, are still problems. 

 I am not sure that we shall not have to 

 manifold the study of attention, as we have 

 that of memory ; and to speak in future of 

 the facts and laws of visual attention, audi- 

 tory attention, and so on, instead of taking 

 'attention' as a single state. I am certain 

 that we must have a more specialized psy- 

 chology of the great variants and resultants 

 of attention — a specialized psychology of 

 expectation and habituation, of practise 

 and fatigue. 



If, then, I have seized the situation cor- 

 rectly, we have in these three fundamental 

 departments of psychology three problems 

 of different orders, the solution of which 

 calls for a diverse endowment of psycho- 

 logical skill and insight. There is an out- 

 lying group of sensations that can, we must 

 believe, be successfully attacked by the an- 

 alytic methods which have been success- 

 fully employed in the other sense depart- 

 ments. The experimental study of the 

 affective processes calls for a much greater 

 gift of originality and constructive im- 

 agination ; we have to shake off literature 

 and tradition, and to begin almost at the 

 beginning. In the ease of attention, we 

 have to push on and make progress along 

 paths already marked out but insufficient- 

 ly explored. 



What holds in this regard of the atten- 

 tion seems to me to hold also (4) for that 

 mixed medley of formations which we in- 

 clude under the general term percepiion. 



I wish that we could banish the word ' per- 

 ception' to the special limbo reserved for 

 unregenerate concepts, and could put in its 

 place a round dozen of concrete and de- 

 scriptive terms! But it has, so far, held 

 its own, and I can hardly avoid its use. 

 We know, now, a great deal about tonal 

 fusion, about space perception, about 

 rhythm — if rhythm be a perception ; we 

 know something about time perception. 

 You will, however, agree with me that no 

 one of these topics is a closed chapter. I 

 see no very pressing problem, as I look 

 over the field; but I see, in every quarter 

 of it, good work that needs doing. I am 

 sorry if this opinion appears indefinite; it 

 is the opinion that I have come to after a 

 study of more than a hundred and fifty 

 articles that deal with perception in the 

 five journals referred to just now: and I 

 can not make it more definite without go- 

 ing so deeply into detail as far to exceed 

 the time allotted to me. 



We can speak a little more concretely of 

 (5) recognition, memory and association. 

 Association was, at first, handled in rather 

 stepmotherly fashion by experimental psy- 

 chology. Of late years, however, we have 

 come to see the importance of detailed an- 

 alyses of the associative, as also of the 

 recognitive consciousness ; we have, I think, 

 finally broken free from the traditional 

 schemata, and are approaching the prob- 

 lem with open minds. Something has al- 

 ready been done; much more remains to 

 do. The experimental study of memory 

 was begun, by Bbbinghaus, rather in a 

 practical or psychophysical than in a psy- 

 chological spirit. In the development of 

 the work since Bbbinghaus, we can trace 

 two tendencies: a tendency towards psy- 

 chological analysis of the memory con- 

 sciousness and the explication of the psy- 

 chological laws of memory: that on the 

 one hand; and on the other, a tendency 

 towards the application in practise of psy- 



