Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/117

No. 1.] visual choice-reactions with visual disturbance; auditory muscular reac- tions with visual disturbance, and vice versa; and, lastly, auditory choice-reactions with visual disturbance, and vice versa. The experiments with simple muscular reactions, where the disturbance and excitation affected the same sense, show, first, that, contrary to the opinion of Wundt and Cattell, muscular reaction-time is lengthened by disturbance; and, second, that a distraction of the attention through the sense of sight has more effect upon reaction-time than a disturbance through the sense of hearing. On the other hand, in the reactions involving choice, the mind is less disturbed in discriminating between sight-impressions than between those of hearing. A similar result appeared in choice-reactions where disturbance and stimulus affected different senses. The writer offers as explanation the facts that we are most often called upon to discriminate rapidly between objects of sight, and that we are more accustomed to disturbances in visual discriminations. The results of experiments with muscular reactions, when the stimulus and disturbance affected different senses, show, in opposition to the conclusions of earlier investigation, that reaction-time is here less influenced than when excitation and disturbance are given through the same sense. It appears also that in simple muscular reactions an intermittent light disturbs the attention more than a sound. An additional series of experiments was made to find how muscular and choice reactions vary when the reagent's attention is directed to different kinds of work. Three tasks were given: repeating a poem previously memorized; reading an English book; reading Kant's Kritik. It was found that the muscular reactions were affected almost as much as those with choice; and the writer concludes that the simple muscular reaction is by no means so perfectly organized a brain reflex as has been supposed.

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The naturalistic standpoint in ethics is right in so far as it denies the obligation of a moral law imposed from without and requires a self-determination from within. It errs in recognizing no other determinants of the will than egoistic ones. The notion of the natural should not be so narrowly conceived as to exclude anti-egoistic impulses and other-regarding motives. By developing social and moral impulses nature guided by teleology rises to a sphere which is natural only as to