Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Abandonment of Sensationalism in Psychology (The American Journal of Psychology, 1909-04-01).pdf/8

Rh, of different periods, prepossessions, and training, speaks unequivocally in favor of the occurrence of elements neither sensational nor affective. It is true that there is no direct physical stimulus of these relational elements and that it is difficult to make out with assurance a complete and definite list of them. Enthusiastic adherents of the doctrine have doubtless alleged as elements what are, after all, complex experiences; but when all has been said, the critics of the doctrine have nothing decisive to urge against the unambiguous introspection of psychologists so divergent in general theory as these already named.

It must be added that this testimony has been fortified, in recent years, by introspection under experimental conditions. One of the latest and most complete of such investigations is made by Bühler whose method—a modification of that of Marbe and Messer—is, in brief, the following. He puts to his subjects, trained introspectors, questions answerable by ‘yes’ or ‘no’ which are intended to excite their thought. After a question has been answered the subject at once analyzes the consciousness preceding and leading to his answer. The questions are suited to the interests of the subjects. Illustrations are: “Can you reach Berlin in seven hours”? “Does monism mean the annihilation of personality”? The results of the investigation have been the discovery that in most cases the observers are distinctly conscious of unsensational and non-affective experiences;  the apparent occurrence of some cases where no image, verbal nor concrete, can be detected;  the confirmation of this introspection by the discovery that a subject often remembers  the images, but only the relation—say, of likeness or of opposition—in an earlier experience. Wundt has very sharply criticised the method of these experiments on the ground, mainly, that it involves disturbance of the subject, and that it does not admit of repetition and variation of the experience to be studied. In the opinion of the writer Bühler successfully meets this attack, appealing to the records of his subjects for evidence of their being undisturbed; and holding that repetition and variation are, in fact, obtainable in the essential sense that questions of the same or of regularly varying types may be repeated.

Wood worth’s method and results resemble those of the Würzburg school, except that he confines himself to the study of comparison (the discovery of equivalent relation), and that in one group of his experiments he offers concrete material—