Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/212

192 192 PSYCHOLOGY. US ; we do our best to tell what it is, but in spite of our good will we may go astray, and give a description more applicable to some other sort of thing. The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached. Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee the psychologist can give for the soundness of any partic- ular psychologic observation which he may report. Such a system we ourselves must strive, as far as may be, to attain. The English writers on psychology, and the school of Herbart in Germany, have in the main contented them- selves with such results as the immediate introspection of single individuals gave, and shown what a body of doctrine they may make. The works of Locke, Hume, Eeid, Hart- ley, Stewart, Brown, the Mills, will always be classics in this line ; and in Professor Bain's Treatises we have prob- ably the last word of what this method taken mainly by itself can do — the last monument of the youth of our science, still untechnical and generally intelligible, like the Chem- istry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was used. The Experimental Method. But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psycholog}^ has arisen in Germany, car- ried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncer- tainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Yierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experi- mental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind