The qualities which marked the author's Beiträge zur Psychologie reappear, if in a less pronounced form, in this treatise on the Problems and Methods of Psychology. If the scope of the work does not admit of the same originality of treatment, we find the same stimulating suggestiveness, the same easy, flowing style, and the same effect of a rapid stream of thought hurrying the author along to conclusions from which, perhaps, calm reflection would have withheld him.
The first chapters in the book are given to the consideration of the problem of Psychology in the broad and narrow sense.
In the narrow sense of the word, Dr. Münsterberg finds that the problem of Psychology is the analysis of the content of consciousness into its elements, and the determination of the rules according to which these elements build up the complex states of mind; but this is merely descriptive: explanation includes the element of necessary result: a phenomenon is not explained until it is shown to result necessarily from some other, generally simpler, phenomenon. Granting the complete parallelism of psychical and neural processes, the former would find their explanation in the causal connection of the latter. That is, Dr. Münsterberg regards Physiological Psychology as the only finally valid Psychology. In the first of his Beiträge (p. 15) he has told us, however, that explanation means the referring back of complicated phenomena to simpler; and to this meaning Psychology, in so far as it is a science of the mind, must hold; the analysis of complex mental states into their elements constitutes psychological explanation. Granting the correctness of the views held by the Association School of Psychology, their derivation of all complex mental states from associative processes assuredly constituted an explanation of the genesis of these states.
The factor of necessary result cannot be transferred from Physiology to Psychology, unless we are to regard the connection between bodily and mental states as causal; but this Dr. Münsterberg in his first Beitrag (p. 18) expressly denies. The problem of Psychology having been determined, what are the methods? The speculative method is of course rejected. Besides this, the author finds that the use of Mathematics in Psychology is absurd: Mathematics can only be applied to phenomena between which there is a causal relation: the numerical determinations of experimental Psychology are not Mathematics, but only exact expressions of facts.
Excepting the mathematical treatment of the psycho-physical methods,
