Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/254

240 in a wide sense as interchangeable with judgment. This brief historical review shows that the status of the experience of belief is still very uncertain. Titchener gives belief a place among the intellectual sentiments and suggests a method of investigation. The object of the present study is to describe, in analytical terms, the experience of belief as it appeared under experimental conditions. A method of single exposures was first used, followed by one of paired comparisons. The first method was applied in three forms. In the first series of experiments, the observers were instructed to give an introspective account of the consciousness of belief and disbelief aroused by the exposure of simple type-written sentences. Another series dealt with the consciousness of certainty or uncertainty accompanying the mental solving of simple arithmetical and algebraical problems presented on slips of paper. In the third series of experiments, sentences or mathematical expressions were read aloud to the observers. Two variations of the method of paired comparisons were used. In the first, sentences, and in the second, mathematical expressions, were presented to the vision. A series of experiments with tones was carried out with one observer. At the conclusion of the whole investigation, the experimenter read to each observer a summary statement of his introspections and in each case the analysis was accepted. The following are the chief results of the experiments. The belief-disbelief consciousness, as something more than a quasi-mechanical acceptance or rejection, is not of common occurrence in ordinary life, yet it may appear fairly regularly under experimental conditions. While not regularly emotional in character, this consciousness may be markedly affective. This consciousness may be given in terms of a general kinæsthetic attitude, or of internal speech and localized kinæsthesis, or of the mutual relations of visual images, in which case the contents come to the observer as being, specifically, belief. If bound up with a particular consciousness, verbal or visual, the contents of the experience do not come to the observer as being, specifically, belief, but as the vehicle of belief, which itself finds conscious representation only in the mode of occurrence of the contents. Belief and disbelief are consciousnesses of the same kind. The certainty-uncertainty consciousness is, in general, more strongly affective than that of belief-disbelief. Certainty is pleasant, doubt, unpleasant.

In a union of science and philosophy having as its end the explanation and systematization of experience, what is the distinct rôle philosophy would play? Comte would make its speciality that of generalities. Cl. Bernard objects that this is both anti-philosophic and anti-scientific. M. Rey fears the vulgarization of science. Such a systematization would be but a classification of scientific theories only serving to show the conflict of ideas. Scientists would hold that experience by its very nature gives us a synthesis. But have scientists admitted that the various results of experimentation are sufficient