Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Abandonment of Sensationalism in Psychology (The American Journal of Psychology, 1909-04-01).pdf/1



The basal purpose of this paper is to call attention to the advance made by present-day psychology on the sensationalism which persisted into the writings of the last decade. In 1893 Wundt, for example, was still designating the affection (Getfühlston, pleasantness or unpleasantness) as an ‘attribute of sensation’. To-day almost all psychologists agree in recognizing at least two classes of not further analyzable elements of consciousness—on the one hand, the sensational elements, on the other hand, the affective elements, pleasaptness and unpleasantness. Stumpf’s view, that sense-pleasantness and sense-unpleasantness are sensational, is the only notable exception to this agreement; and recent criticism—that of Titchener, Johnston, and Meyer —has so successfully assailed the doctrine that it need not here be considered.

But the effort to correct the crude and misleading simplicity of sensationalism has not stopped short at the admission of a new class of elements including merely pleasantness and unpleasantness. Explicitly or implicitly many psychologists now admit the occurrence of still other elemental kinds of consciousness. With the two important and distinct forms of this advance on sensationalism this paper specifically deals.

The first of these contemporary movements does not add to the number of classes of conscious elements, but it enlarges one of the classes already recognized. ‘This is the theory of Wundt who includes in the class of the affections, or ‘feelings’, four elements (or rather classes of elements) co-ordinate with

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