interrupted. "It is not at all surprising," says Professor Wundt, who certainly speaks with authority in this field, "that psychology, which has become an independent discipline only within comparatively recent years, should be mainly occupied with elementary problems, with problems largely to be found on the boundary line between physiological and psychological research, but it goes without saying that its final vocation must not be determined by its present status."[1] And Professor Titchener declared in his address before the Congress at St. Louis: "You know without my telling you … that the course of experimental psychology in recent years has been away from simple numerical determinations, and towards introspective analysis; and that the experimental method has been continually extended from the simpler processes to the more complex, whether to complexes hitherto untouched, by experiment, or to unfamiliar phases of familiar mental formations."[2] "I have little sympathy or patience with those experimentalists who would build up an experimental psychology out of psychophysics and logic; who throw stimuli into the organism, take reactions out, and then, from some change in the nature of the reactions, infer the fact of a change in consciousness. Why in the world should one argue and infer when consciousness itself is there, always there, waiting to be interrogated? This is but a penny in the slot sort of science. Compared with introspective psychology, it is quick, it is easy, it is often showy. We have been a little bit corrupted by the early interest in psychophysics, or, perhaps more truly, we have not all learned instinctively to distinguish between psychophysics and psychology proper, and so we are apt to take the tables and curves of reactions for psychological results, and the inferences from them for psychological laws. Now the results, where they are not purely physiological or anthropometrical, are psychophysical results. As such they have their usefulness; and the psychological laboratory is their right place of origin. But there is no reason why one should gain psychological credit for them
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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
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