IV. THE PLACE OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
[At the opening of Emerson Hall, December 27, 1905, the American Psychological Association discussed the relation of psychology to philosophy; I opened the discussion with the following remarks:]
From the whole set of problems which cluster about psychology and its relation to neighboring sciences, this hour, in which Emerson Hall is completed, and this room, in which I hope to teach psychology to the end of my life, suggest to me most forcibly to-day the one question: Have I been right in housing psychology under this roof? I might have gone to the avenue yonder and might have begged for a psychological laboratory in the spacious quarters of the Agassiz Museum, to live there in peaceful company with the biologists; or I might have persuaded our benefactors to build for me a new wing of the physical laboratory. But I insisted that the experimental psychologists feel at home only where logic and ethics, metaphysics and epistemology keep house on the next floor.
I certainly do not mean that the psychologist ought to mix the records of his instruments with the demands of his speculations, and that he may seek help from the Absolute when the figures of the chronoscope or the curves of the kymograph are doubtful. Experimental psychology is certainly to-day and will be for all future an independent exact discipline with its own problems and methods. No one can insist more earnestly than I do on the demarcation line between the empirical study of mental phenomena and the logical enquiry into the values of life.
Yet I deny that it is a personal idiosyncrasy of mine to try to combine vivid interest in both. There is no antagonism between them; a man may love both his mother and his bride. I am devoted to philosophy, just as I love my native country; and I am devoted to psychology, just as I love the country in which I do my daily work; I feel sure there is no reason for any friction between them.
Of course, on the surface a psychological laboratory has much more likeness to the workshop of the physicist. But that has to do with externalities only. The psychologist and the physicist alike use subtle instruments, need dark rooms and sound-proof rooms, and are spun into a web of electric wires. And yet the physicist has never done anything else than to measure his objects, while I feel sure that no psychologist has ever measured a psychical state. Psychical states are not quantities, and every so-called measurement thereof refers merely to their physical accompaniments and conditions. The world of mental phenomena is a world of qualities, in which one is never a multiple of the other, and the deepest tendencies of physics and psychology are thus utterly divergent.
The complicated apparatus is therefore not an essential for the psychologist. Of course, we shall use every corner of our twenty-four laboratory-rooms upstairs, and every instrument in the new cases—and yet much of our most interesting work is done without any paraphernalia. Three of the doctor-dissertations which our psychological laboratory completed last year consisted of original research in which no instruments were involved; they dealt with memory-images, with associations, with æsthetic feeling, and so on. Yes, when, a short time ago, a Western university asked me how much it would cost to introduce a good practical training-course in experimental psychology, I replied that it would cost them the salary of a really good psychologist, and besides, perhaps, one dollar for cardboard, strings, rulers, colored paper, wire, and similar fancy articles at five cents apiece.
On the other hand, I do not know a psychological experiment which does not need a philosophical background to bring its results into sharp relief. Of course, you will say, the psychologist deals with facts, not with theories, and has to analyze and to describe and to explain those facts. Certainly he has to do all that; only he must not forget that the so-called "fact" in psychology is the product of complex transformations of reality. A will, an emotion, a memory-image, a feeling, an act of attention, of judgment, of decision—these are not found in the way in which stones and stars are noticed. Even if I choose perceptions or sensations as material for my psychological study, and still more when I call them my perceptions and my sensations, I mean something which I have found at the end of a long logical road, not at its starting-point, and that road certainly leads through philosophy. Emerson said wisely, "A philosopher must be more than a philosopher;" we can add: A psychologist must be more than a psychologist. First of all, he must be a philosopher.
What would be the result if our laboratory had moved to the naturalistic headquarters? It would be the beginning of a complete separation from philosophy. Our graduate students would flock to psychological research work without even being aware that without philosophical training they are mere dilettantes. And soon enough a merely psychological doctorate would be demanded. I do not deny at all that such pure psychologists would find enough to do; I should doubt only whether they know what they are doing. There are too many psychologists already who go their way so undisturbed only because they walk like somnambulists on the edge of the roof; they do not even see the real problem; they do not see the depths to which they may fall.
But does the laboratory itself gain from such divorce? Just the contrary. It is evident that everywhere in the world where the psychological laboratory turns to natural science, the experiments deal mostly with sensation, perception, and reaction; while those laboratories which keep their friendship with epistemology emphasize the higher mental functions, experimenting on attention, memory, association, feeling, emotion, thought, and so on. But is it not clear that only the latter work gives to the psychological laboratory a real right to existence, as the former is almost completely overlapped by the well-established interests of the physiologists? If psychology cannot do anything else than that which physiologists like Helmholtz, Hering, Kries, Mach, Bowditch, and the rest have always done so successfully, then experimental psychology had better give up the trade and leave the study of the mind to the students of the organism.
I have said that we ought not to depend on authorities here. Yet one name, I think, ought to be mentioned gratefully in this hour in which the new psychological laboratory is opened for work. I think of Professor Wundt of Leipzig. The directors of the psychological laboratories in Columbia, and Yale, in Clark and Chicago, in Pennsylvania and Cornell, in Johns Hopkins and Washington, in Leland Stanford and Harvard, and many more are his pupils. Some weeks ago, when I did not foresee our present discussion, I told him of Emerson Hall; and a few days ago I got an answer from which, as my closing word, I may quote in translation. Professor Wundt writes to me: "I am especially glad that you affiliated your new psychological laboratory to philosophy, and that you did not migrate to the naturalists. There seems to be here and there a tendency to such migration, yet I believe that psychology not only now, but for all time, belongs to philosophy: only then can psychology keep its necessary independence." Mr. Chairman, these are the words of the father of experimental psychology. I hope they indicate the policy to which Harvard University will adhere forever.