Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Abandonment of Sensationalism in Psychology (The American Journal of Psychology, 1909-04-01).pdf/5

Rh The radical modification of Wundt’s theory embodied in the last sentence is submitted for the consideration of his critics. Stated in more detail it involves the following teaching:

. ‘Tension’ is reducible to attention, or clearness, plus the organic sensations characteristic of attention.

The significance of this assertion varies, of course, according to one’s doctrine of attention. If one follow Professor Titchener in the teaching that attention, or clearness, is itself sensational—in other words, that one may attend to sensations only—then we have here no enlargement of the traditional list of elements. But, in the view of the writer, Titchener’s teaching cannot be maintained. He himself is at pains to admit that it is opposed to the view of several psychologists—he names Sully, Meumann, Saxinger —who hold that unsensational contents may be attended to. The doctrine seems, indeed, inconsistent with Titchener’s own doctrine: that introspection consists simply in attention to phenomena. For, as Titchener unequivocally teaches, the affections are known by introspection and it follows that they must be ‘clear’ or ‘attended to’. The denial of the sensational character of tension (attention) leaves us with the problem of the nature of it still upon our hands. The conclusion of the writer—which there is not here time to defend in detail—is that attention is an elemental consciousness co-ordinate in various ways both with pleasantness–unpleasantness (the affections) and with the elemental experience of realness, and thus belonging with these to a larger class of ‘attributive elements of consciousness’. This is a doctrine agreeing with Wundt’s both in that it admits the unsensational and elemental character of tension (attention) and in that it co-ordinates tension with pleasantness–unpleasantness, but agreeing with the teaching of Wundt’s critics in refusing to call tension ‘affection’ or ‘feeling’.

. Relaxation, in the second place, probably is merely the absence of strain. Alechsieff himself seems virtually to imply this. So far as relaxation is a positive experience it seems to reduce, as Titchener teaches, to organic sensations.

and. The case is different with excitement and quiescence (Erregung–Beruhigung). These are complex, not elemental, experiences; and the distinguishing feature of them is neither the organic sensations—though these are present and significant—nor any new kind of feeling, but rather the vivid consciousness of doubtful future or of irrevocable past. This analysis is corroborated by a study of the introspective records