Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - The Abandonment of Sensationalism in Psychology (The American Journal of Psychology, 1909-04-01).pdf/9

Rh colors and forms—for comparison. Earlier experimenters have found traces of relational experiences in the course of investigations concerned primarily with association. T’he experiments, for example, by which Professor Gamble and the writer tested Lehmann’s assertion that recognition consists in associated images, disclosed a large number of cases in which the consciousness of familiarity, occurring markedly earlier than any associated images, is most readily described as relational experience.

It is highly important to emphasize the fact that this doctrine of a third kind of elemental consciousness is not necessarily synonymous with the hypothesis of imageless thought. The writer of this paper frankly deprecates the tendency of certain psychologists—of Stout, Bühler, Woodworth, for example—to insist that the occurrence of imageless thought has been proved. For it is always possible to question the completeness and the accuracy of the introspect on which this conclusion is based. What is abundantly proved is that along with imagery, and often in the focus of attention, when one compares and reasons and recognizes, are elements neither sensational nor affective. It is unwise and unnecessary to advance a larger claim. Wundt’s constructive suggestion that the so-called relational factor in experience analyzes into feeling and attention derives all its cogency, in the opinion of the writer, from the fact, already discussed, that Wundt’s feelings include relational factors. In other words, Wundt can afford to deny relational elements because he illicitly and unwittingly holds them concealed within his heterogeneous class of ‘feelings’.

From this review of the Wundtian doctrine of the ‘feelings’ and of the doctrines—diverse in form but alike in essentials—which affirm that there are relational of ‘thought’-elements in consciousness it is clear that the domination of sensationalism in psychology has passed. ‘This means the enfranchisement of psychology from the most hampering of the prejudices which have retarded its progress. She a priori assumption that all consciousness is completely analyzable into sensational factors has too long interfered with introspective observation. Students of consciousness, successful in finding what they were told to find, have resolved recognition into associated imagery, thought into verbal imagery, and will into antecedent images, with complete disregard of any further outcome of introspection. The downfall of pure sensationalism should be welcomed by psychologists in the interest—not of any other theory—but of free and unprejudiced experimental observation.