Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/410

 396 G. SPILLER : WUNDT AND ' PURE SELF-OBSERVATION '. any way denying the possibilities of the " experimental " method, that there is another as yet untried method, plausible beyond any other, which men might apply, perchance with success, perchance not the method of self-examination by means of systematic obser- vation and experiment as sketched above. The idea is not new Beneke lauded it to the skies, and psychologists however they may protest that " the endeavour to observe oneself must inevit- ably introduce changes into the course of mental events, changes which could not have occurred without it, and whose usual con- sequence is that the very process which was to have been observed disappears from consciousness " (p. 5) have never failed to resort to it occasionally. The plea, therefore, is that a relatively old method which, to the writer's knowledge, has never been applied systematically and everything depends on the systematic applica- tion should at least receive serious consideration, apart from those many speculative objections which evidently beg the very points which are to be demonstrated. If the question be now raised why internal observation has not been systematically pursued by psychologists as external observa- tion has been systematically employed in the other sciences, we find our answer in Wundt. He lays it down, perhaps more em- phatically than is necessary, that "psychological inquiries have, up to the most recent times, been undertaken solely in the interest of philosophy " (p. 2). If this be so, who can be astonished if the speculative method and not the objective scientific method has been applied until recently to the study of mental facts'? And, seeing that Wundt himself is a philosopher, does not this account for his opinion that self -inspection is supposed to be " inevitably exposed to the grossest self-deception," and that the " sole re- source " of the subjective method " is an inaccurate inner percep- tion"? (p. 7). Finally, it is true that a distinguished scholar has at the end of a long and brilliant career condemned root-and-branch the intro- spective method as applied apart from " experiment," and that able thinkers before him back to Herbart, Kant and Hume have expressed themselves not less emphatically in the same vein. At the same time, all these men were philosophers practised in the speculative method and confessedly strangers to the scientific method of exhaustive and circumspect observation and experiment. Shall we, in a scientific age, echo this universal condemnation without seriously questioning it first? Who knows from what quarter the truth may come? Perhaps from some despised Nazareth. GUSTAV SPILLER.