Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Abandonment of Sensationalism in Psychology (The American Journal of Psychology, 1909-04-01).pdf/4

Rh to the opposite conclusion. In these experiments Hayes presents to his subjects “series of stimuli—tones or colors or rhythms— … two at a time. … Every member of the series is paired with every other member. The observer has to decide which of the two … is the more pleasant, the more unpleasant, the more exciting, the more depressing, and so on.” The results are the following: Tension was “described throughout in kinesthetic terms.”  Only judgments of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and tension were easily made. (In opposition to Alechsieff’s later results) the decisions ‘exciting’ and ‘relaxing’ agree with the decisions ‘pleasant’; whereas the decisions ‘quiescent’ and ‘straining’ agreed with the decision ‘unpleasant’. In other words, the alleged elements did not vary independently, and Titchener concludes that “since the pleasant-unpleasant dimension is not in dispute, we have a strong indication that that alone is fundamental.”

The impartial student of these counter investigations must admit that no decisive result, on either side, has as yet been experimentally established. Alechsieff challenges the presupposition of the Cornell experimenters that “it is impossible, through one and the same stimulus, to excite two different feeling-qualities”; and Titchener admits that the “argument upon which the experiments rest is not demonstrably valid;” but, on his side, Alechsieff by his own confession has to twist and pull the results of Lehmann, Brahn, and others in order to fit them into his tridimensional theory. The failure of experiment throws us back on introspection; and on this basis, again, in the opinion of the writer, neither the Wundtians nor their critics wholly make their point. On the one hand the critics are justified in the assertion that elemental affective elements—or feeling-elements strictly co-ordinate with pleasantness and unpleasantness—are not discovered in our emotional experience. Yet, on the other hand, the opponents of the theory, in their attempts to reduce all four of the new ‘feelings’ to organic sensations, ignore introspective testimony which has at least the face-value of their own. When Alechsieff’s subjects protest that they ‘‘feel the strain-sensations’’, but that they experience in addition to the strain sensations (and to the pleasantness or unpleasantness) a residuum which reduces neither to sensation nor to affection, there is no valid reason to discredit their testimony. But their ‘residuum’ will turn out, in the view of the writer, to be either identical with ‘clearness’ (the attention-element), or to belong to a third class of elemental experiences—a class co-ordinate with sensations and affections—that of relational experiences.