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vi The text-book, however, is a necessary yet a subsidiary adjunct to the study of any science. It is useful only as it stimulates, directs, verifies and supplements the individual observation of the reader. This book has been written, accordingly, with the constant purpose of leading students to the independent and careful study of their own consciousness. It is highly desirable that such introspective study should be supplemented by experiments, performed by the student under direction, and that this experimental introspection should precede, instead of following, the study of every division of the text. Detailed references are given, at appropriate points, to the two English manuals of experimental psychology.

The general reader who may open this volume should be warned against certain technical chapters. He will do well to skim, Part I, omitting entirely Chapters VII. and VIII. and he should especially devote himself to Part II., from which, however, he may drop out Chapters XIII., XVIII., and XIX.

The final paragraph in this. Preface is the pleasantest, in all the book, to write, for it contains my acknowledgements to the people who have helped me. My greatest indebtedness is to Professors William James and Hugo Münsterberg. One of the distinctive theories of the book—the existence of elements of consciousness which are neither sensational nor affective—is simply a developed and systematized statement of the teaching of James, and the frequent quotations from the “Principles of Psychology” are better reading than any original paragraph in the book. The second fundamental theory of this book, the conception of psychology as a science of related selves, is closely affiliated with Münsterberg’s conception of history as science of the relations of willing subjects; and few chapters of the book are uninfluenced by his vigorous