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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/326

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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

psychology as well as the other sciences. When the separate sciences developed, some part of psychology was taken with them, and the physicist, the physiologist and the zoologist made experiments and researches which are now claimed by psychology. In the meanwhile philosophy continued to care for psychology—we have, for example, in England Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and in Germany Herbart—but sometimes without sufficient attention to observation and experiment. Then about fifty years ago, in the hands of those who cared both for philosophy and science—Lotze, Fechner, Helmholtz, Wundt and others—psychology took definite shape as a natural and experimental science. Wundt's 'Physiologische Psychologie,' published in 1874, was the first comprehensive handbook. James's 'Principles of Psychology,' published in 1890, is equally important and more readable. Apart from numerous good text-books and treatises in various languages, we had the first laboratory manual in Sanford's 'Course in Experimental Psychology' (1894), but this only treated the senses which had already been pretty well worked over by physicists and physiologists. Now in Titchener's 'Experimental Psychology: a Manual of Laboratory Practice'—the work is published by the Macmillans—we have the first complete laboratory course in psychology. It is a large work: Volume I, which has alone been issued, includes two parts treating qualitative experiments, one intended for the student (xviii + 214 pp.) and the other for the instructor (xxxiii+456 pp.). Two further volumes, treating quantitative experiments, are promised. The experiments are described in chapters entitled: Visual sensation, Auditory sensation, Cutaneous sensation. Gustatory sensation. Olfactory sensation, Organic sensation. The affective qualities, Attention and action, Visual space perception. Auditory perception, Tactual space perception. Ideational type and the association of ideas, Appendices.

Detailed comment and criticism must be relegated to the special journals. There is no question but that the work will greatly forward the teaching of experimental psychology and is invaluable to the teacher and advanced student. There will be difference of opinion as to how far the book can be put to advantage in the hands of students beginning laboratory work in psychology, and the question can only be settled by actual trial. There is naturally less agreement as to what experiments should be made and what methods should be used than in the ease of sciences, such as chemistry and physics, where natural selection has long been at work. But Professor Titchener has laid the foundation on which future workers must build.