Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/577

ANTONIO ALIOTTA, La Misura in Psicoloyia Sperimentale. 563 to fixate the variations objectively. . . . The formulae have merely a symbolic value and must always be translated into qualitative terms before they can assume psychological significance " (p. 241). "It is only when it (the size of an error of measurement) is con- sidered as a sign of qualitative variation in a psychical phenomenon that it enters indirectly into the field of psychology " (p. 111). Measurement, he concludes, cannot serve as the basis of a mathe- matical construction for psychology. The one reason for pre- serving it is that " it gives an objective fixation to psychical phenomena and renders internal observation scientific " (p. 242). To this pass, to the banishment of measurement from psychology has Prof. Aliotta brought us, never deviating on the way, as he fondly believes, from the path of pure psychology, namely im- mediate experience ! Unluckily the truth must be faced that we never hit the proper path at the starting point. For we have Prof. Aliotta's own admission that sensations are " psychological abstractions " (p. 51), never revealed to adult consciousness in primitive purity (p. 56). Yet the proven immeasurability of these " abstractions " forms the groundwork of his whole argument. I must confess that I fail to see how psychology can confine herself even to a description of immediate experiences without employing abstractions. If she is to be a science, pursued by analytic, synthethic, genetic and comparative methods, she can no more affect to dispense with abstractions than can any other branch of science. We will admit that the intensities of sensations are in the strict sense devoid of magnitude ; a sensation is merely equal to or greater or less than other sensations of like character, and is never half or twice as great as another. But spatial and temporal experiences have magnitude and it is in terms of these experiences that in common parlance we express the intensities of sensations. True, that magnitude is an abstraction. It does not literally lie in these spatial or temporal experiences themselves, no more than a colour rests in the external object to which it belongs. But simply because magnitude is a mediate and not an immediate datum of experience, are we justified in banishing it from pure psychology ? In fine, are we justified from the psychological standpoint in so rigidly isolating objective from subjective, physical quantity from psychological quality ? Or is not such a distinction the concern of philosophy, not of psychology ? I have left myself scant space to do justice to Prof. Aliotta's views of the position of chronometry and ergometry in psychology. But this is only because I am generally in close agreement with the level-headed criticism which he passes on these subjects. With regard to reaction times he employs to great advantage what Prof. Ward calls the " strictly psychological standpoint ". He shows the unwarrantability of subtracting various kinds of re- action times from one another with the object of timing the sup- posed psychological function involved in their difference. He exposes the fallacy of analysing simple reaction times into times