Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/162

152 been entirely misunderstood. The possibility of misunderstanding I frankly admitted; Wirth's language, I said, is "both difficult and obscure," and is "not always consistent;" and indeed, any one can verify the point for himself by trying to translate some page of Wirth's writing into another language. I, therefore, offered my "interpretation of Wirth's attitude . . . with all reserve," and I am now merely repeating a former statement when I say that I was in constant doubt as to the very nature of his main problem (§§1-5). Nevertheless, in my discussion of Wirth's results, I tried to keep the two possible forms of his problem equally in mind, and to remember that his intention might be to measure either the range of consciousness or the range of attention only. Hence Wirth's principal accusation, that I have simply and completely misunderstood him, is incorrect. I may complain, on my side, that in some points at least he has misunderstood me, and has interpreted my remarks in such a way as to exaggerate, or even to create, difficulties which did not exist either in my words or in my thought. Moreover, he often criticises me, without reason, rather for what I have not said than for what I did say.

Thus, with an experimental arrangement as complicated and a method as elaborate as his, it was impossible for me to do justice to all details in a short discussion. For I did not, as Wirth puts it at the beginning of his Reply, intend my article to be "eine Orientierung iiber den gegenwartigen Stand der experimentellen Analyse der Aufmerksamkeit." I did not even offer an exhaustive review of Wirth's own work, but merely "a discussion of his contributions to the subject." Again, Wirth's interpretation of my sentence: "thus the results confirm and extend those of previous tachistoscopic experiments upon the range of attention," implies that I had written: "of his previous experiments, etc." (§5). His statement that I had failed to see the logical relation of the "entweder oder" (§5) in Wundt's discussion of Wirth's tachistoscopes, I can only characterize as amazing. As a matter of fact, I had never even hinted at a reference to that particular phrase. I simply mentioned Wundt's belief that the tachistoscope may be used for measuring not only the range of attention, but also the "Gesammtumfang des Bewusstseins."