BY C. H. JOHNSTON
The problem at issue in the present investigation concerns the combination of feelings. On the basis of theories as different in many respects as those of Wundt, of Titchener, of Lipps, etc., the feeling-state is always a unity. The affective process for Wundt must be always "coextensive with consciousness." When he chooses to speak of a "mixed feeling," it never for him signifies a "mosaic in consciousness," but is always a new Totalgefühl, which "swamps consciousness as a whole."
Titchener also believes that with every affective experience an inevitable and pervasive "tilting" of the whole organism occurs. W. McDougall, in his recent Physiological Psychology, makes the general statement that always a "massive state of feeling results" when many sensations are simultaneously excited, and that in such case we cannot "introspectively distinguish the feeling-tone of each sensation."
We started to examine by experiment and by introspection which feeling-effect really results from a combination of various impressions with affective tone, and whether it is really impossible that various feelings coexist and remain distinguishable. In case they can coexist, the question arises: What mutual influences can be discovered?
For the main part of our study the simplest possible feelings were chosen, because here presumably the subjects will not be forced to grapple with complex personal psychoses, necessarily confusing from their very richness. It was thought that here they could be more nearly normal, naïve, less artificial, and able to a maximum to rid themselves of preconceived personal opinions and unaccountable associations. Here, with simplest stimulations, unsophisticated necessarily, the hope at any rate is that work with a good number of subjects of distinct emotional temperaments may bring to light certain fresh simple introspective facts, which may in their turn offer valuable considerations concerning the psychology of feeling.
Throughout the course of the experiment, except in the advanced stage when more complex states were under consideration, sounds, colors, odors, simple figures, and tactual surfaces were used. In the late stage of the investigation sentences and pictures more or less morally and æsthetically suggestive served to furnish for study the complex feeling-states.
The progress of the investigation divides itself naturally into the following four distinct parts.
I. From every experience of each individual the investigator sought to obtain from the subject's own introspection at the time as adequate a description as possible of the particular feeling provoked by the chosen stimulus. The feelings studied in this first period of the investigation are entirely those which heretofore have not been at all classified except in terms of the objects which call them forth. Part I is concerned with single stimuli affecting only one kind of sense-organ, visual, tactual, auditory, or olfactory as the case may be.
Two requests were made of each subject, viz: