But sound as the reasoning here would be, were the premises correct, I fear the latter cannot pass.However it may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger, about weaker feelings, and about the relations to each other of all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error and uncertainty so soon as we are called on to name and class, and not merely to feel.Who can be sure of the exact order of his feelings when they are excessively rapid? Who can be sure, in his sensible perception of a chair, how much comes from the eye and how much is supplied out of the previous knowledge of the mind? Who can compare with precision the quantities of disparate feelings even where the feelings are very much alike.For instance, where an object is felt now against the back and now against the cheek, which feeling is most extensive? Who can be sure that two given feelings are or are not exactly the same? Who can tell which is briefer or longer than the other when both occupy but an instant of time? Who knows, of many actions, for what motive they were done, or if for any motive at all? Who can enumerate all the distinct ingredients of such a complicated feeling as anger ? and who can tell offhand whether or no a perception of distance be a compound or a simple state of mind.The whole mind-stuff controversy would stop if we could decide conclusively by introspection that what seem to us elementary feelings are really elementary and not compound.
Mr.Sully, in his work on Illusions, has a chapter on those of Introspection from which we might now quote.But, since the rest of this volume will be little more than a collection of illustrations of the difficulty of discovering by direct introspection exactly what our feelings and their relations are, we need not anticipate our own future details, but just state our general conclusion that introspection is difficult and fallible ; and that the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind.Something is before us ; we do our best to tell what it is, but in spite of our good will we may go astray, and give a description more applicable to some other sort of thing.The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached.Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee the psychologist can give for the soundness of any particular psychologic observation which he may report.Such a system we ourselves must strive, as far as may be, to attain.
The English writers on psychology, and the school of Herbart in Germany, have in the main contented themselves with such results as the immediate introspection of single individuals gave, and shown what a body of doctrine they may make.The works of Locke, Hume, Reid, Hartley, Stewart Brown, the Mills, will always be classics in this line ; and in Professor Brain's Treatises we have probably the last word of what this method taken mainly by itself can do - the last monument of the youth of our science, still untechnical and generally intelligible, like the Chemistry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was used.
The Experimental Method.But psychology is passing into a less simple phase.Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means.This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored.Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales.The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege , in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow.There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers.They mean business, not chivalry.What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about.
No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.The principal fields of experimentation so far have been : 1) the connection of conscious states with their physical conditions, including the whole of brain-physiology, and the recent minutely cultivated physiology of the sense-organs, together with what is technically known as 'psycho-physics,' or the laws of correlation between sensations and the outward stimuli by which they are aroused ;
2) the analysis of space-perception into its sensational elements ; 3)
the measurement of the duration of the simplest mental processes ; 4) that of the accuracy of reproduction in the memory of sensible experiences and of intervals of space and time ; 5) that of the manner in which simple mental states influence each other , call each other up, or inhibit each other's reproduction ; 6) that of the number of facts which consciousness can simultaneously discern ; finally, 7)
that of the elementary laws of oblivescence and retention.It must be said that in some of these fields the results have as yet borne little theoretic fruit commensurate with the great labor expended in their acquisition.
