Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory by Hugo Münsterberg (100 books to read .txt) 📕

caused by simultaneously given stimuli.

A few observations made in connection with these experiments are of

general interest. The frog, when it first sees a moving object,

usually draws the nictitating membrane over the eye two or three times

as if to clear the surface for clearer vision. Frequently this action

is the only evidence available that the animal has noticed an object.

This movement of the eyelids I have noticed in other amphibians and

in reptiles under similar conditions, and since it always occurs when

the animals have need of the clearest possible vision, I think the

above interpretation of the action is probably correct.

Secondly, the frog after getting a glimpse of an object orients

itself by turning its head towards the object, and then waits for a

favorable chance to spring. The aiming is accurate, and as previously

stated the animal is persistent in its attempts to seize an object.

XII. THE PAIN-SCREAM OF FROGS.

While making measurements of the frog’s reaction time to electrical

stimulation, I noticed that after a few repetitions of a 2-volt,

.0001-ampère stimulus an animal would frequently make a very peculiar

noise. The sound is a prolonged scream, like that of a child, made by

opening the mouth widely. The ordinary croak and grunt are made with

closed or but slightly opened mouth. The cry at once reminds one of

the sounds made by many animals when they are frightened. The rabbit,

for example, screams in much the same way when it is caught, as do

also pigs, dogs, rats, mice and many other animals. The question

arises, is this scream indicative of pain? While studying reaction

time I was able to make some observations on the relation of the

scream to the stimulus.

First, the scream is not given to weak stimuli, even upon many

repetitions. Second, it is given to such strengths of an electrical

stimulus as are undoubtedly harmful to the animal. Third, after a frog

has been stimulated with a strong current (two volts), until the

scream is given with almost every repetition, it will scream in the

same way when even a weak stimulus is applied. If, for instance, after

a two-volt stimulus has been given a few times, the animal be merely

touched with a stick, it will scream. It thus appears as if the strong

stimulus increases the irritability of the center for the

scream-reflex to such an extent that even weak stimuli are sufficient

to cause the reaction. Are we to say that the weak stimulus is painful

because of the increased irritability, or may it be concluded that the

reflex is in this case, like winking or leg-jerk or the head-lowering

and puffing, simply a forced movement, which is to be explained as an

hereditary protective action, but not as necessarily indicative of any

sort of feeling. Clearly if we take this stand it may at once be said

that there is no reason to believe the scream indicative of pain at

any time. And it seems not improbable that this is nearer the truth

than one who hears the scream for the first time is likely to think.

The pain-scream is of interest in this consideration of auditory

reactions because it increases the range of sounds which we should

expect frogs to hear if we grant the probability of them hearing their

own voices.

It may be worth while to recall at this point the fact that a whistle

from the human lips—the nearest approach to the pain-scream among the

sounds which were used as stimuli in the experiments on

respiration—caused marked inhibition of respiration. Perhaps this

fact may be interpreted in the light of the pain-scream reaction. I

may add that I have never seen a frog give a motor reaction to the

pain-scream. Thinking it would certainly alarm the animals and cause

them to make some movement which would serve for reaction-time

measurements, I made repeated trials of its effects, but could never

detect anything except respiratory changes.

*

STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY.

*

THE POSITION OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE.

BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG.

The modern efforts to bring all sciences into a system or at least to

classify them, from Bacon to Spencer, Wundt and Pearson have never, if

we abstract here from Hegel, given much attention to those questions

of principle which are offered by the science of psychology. Of course

the psychological separation of different mental functions has often

given the whole scheme for the system, the classification thus being

too often more psychological than logical. Psychology itself,

moreover, has had for the most part a dignified position in the

system; even when it has been fully subordinated to the biological

sciences, it was on the other hand placed superior to the totality of

mental and moral sciences, which then usually have found their unity

under the positivistic heading ‘sociology.’ And where the independent

position of psychology is acknowledged and the mental and moral

sciences are fully accredited, as for instance with Wundt, psychology

remains the fundamental science of all mental sciences; the objects

with which philology, history, economics, politics, jurisprudence,

theology deal are the products of the processes with which psychology

deals, and philology, history, theology, etc., are thus related to

psychology, as astronomy, geology, zoölogy are related to physics.

There is thus nowhere a depreciation of psychology, and yet it is not

in its right place. Such a position for psychology at the head of all

‘Geisteswissenschaften’ may furnish a very simple classification for

it, but it is one which cannot express the difficult character of

psychology and the complex relations of the system of mental sciences.

The historical and philological and theological sciences cannot be

subordinated to psychology if psychology as science is to be

coördinated with physics, that is, if it is a science which describes

and explains the psychical objects in the way in which physics

describes and explains the physical objects. On the other hand, if it

means in this central position of mental sciences a science which does

not consider the inner life as an object, but as subjective activity

needing to be interpreted and subjectively understood, not as to its

elements, but as to its meaning, then we should have two kinds of

psychology, one which explains and one which interprets. They would

speak of different facts, the one of the inner life as objective

content of consciousness, as phenomenon, the other of the inner life

as subjective attitude, as purpose.

The fact is, that these two sciences exist to-day. There are

psychologists who recognize both and keep them separated, others who

hold to the one or the other as the only possible view; they are

phenomenalists or voluntarists. Mostly both views are combined, either

as psychological voluntarism with interposed concessions to

phenomenalism or as phenomenalism with the well-known concessions to

voluntarism at the deciding points. Further, those who claim that

psychology must be phenomenalistic—and that is the opinion of the

present writer—do not on that account hold that the propositions of

voluntarism are wrong. On the contrary: voluntarism, we say, is right

in every respect except in believing itself to be psychology.

Voluntarism, we say, is the interpretative account of the real life,

of immediate experience, whose reality is understood by understanding

its meaning sympathetically, but we add that in this way an objective

description can never be reached. Description presupposes

objectivation; another aspect, not the natural aspect of life, must be

chosen to fulfill the logical purposes of psychology: the

voluntaristic inner life must be considered as content of

consciousness while consciousness is then no longer an active subject

but a passive spectator. Experience has then no longer any meaning in

a voluntaristic sense; it is merely a complex of elements. We claim

that every voluntaristic system as far as it offers descriptions and

explanations has borrowed them from phenomenalistic psychology and is

further filled up by fragments of logic, ethics and æsthetics, all of

which refer to man in his voluntaristic aspect. We claim, therefore,

that such a voluntaristic theory has no right to the name psychology,

while we insist that it gives a more direct account of man’s real life

than psychology can hope to give, and, moreover, that it is the

voluntaristic man whose purpose creates knowledge and thus creates the

phenomenalistic aspect of man himself.

We say that the voluntaristic theory, the interpretation of our real

attitudes, in short teleological knowledge, alone can account for the

value and right of phenomenalistic psychology and it thus seems unfair

to raise the objection of ‘double bookkeeping.’ These two aspects of

inner life are not ultimately independent and exclusive; the

subjective purposes of real life necessarily demand the labors of

objectivistic psychology. The last word is thus not dualistic but

monistic and the two truths supplement each other. But this

supplementation must never be misinterpreted as meaning that the two

sciences divide inner experience, as if, for instance, the

phenomenalistic study dealt with perceptions and ideas, the

voluntaristic with feelings and volitions. No, it is really a

difference of logical purpose of treatment and thus a difference of

points of view only; the whole experience without exception must be

possible material for both. There is no feeling and no volition which

is not for the phenomenalist a content of consciousness and nothing

else. There is, on the other hand, no perception and no idea which is

not, or better, ought not to be for the voluntarist a means, an aim, a

tool, an end, an ideal. In that real life experience of which the

voluntarist is speaking, every object is the object of will and those

real objects have not been differentiated into physical things under

the abstract categories of mechanics on the one hand, and psychical

ideas of them in consciousness on the other; the voluntarist, if he is

consistent, knows neither physical nor psychical phenomena.

Phenomenalist and voluntarist thus do not see anything under the same

aspect, neither the ideas nor the will.

This difference is wrongly set forth if the antithesis to voluntarism

is called intellectualism. Intellectualism is based on the category of

judgment, and judgment too is a ideological attitude. Phenomenalism

does not presuppose a subject which knows its contents but a subject

which simply has its contents; the consciousness which has the

thought as content does not take through that the voluntaristic

attitude of knowing it and the psychologist has therefore no reason to

prefer the thought to the volition and thus to play the

intellectualist. If the psychologist does emphasize the idea and its

elements, the sensations, it is not because they are vehicles of

thought but because their relations to physical objects make them

vehicles of communication. The elements of ideas are negotiable and

thus through their reference to the common physical world indirectly

describable; as the elements of ideas are alone in this position, the

psychologist is obliged to consider all contents of consciousness,

ideas and volitions alike, as complexes of sensations.

The antithesis is also misinterpreted, or at least wrongly narrowed,

if it is called voluntarism versus associationism. Recent

discussions have sufficiently shown that the principle of association

is not the only possible one for phenomenalistic theories. If

associationism is identified with objective psychology, all the

well-founded objections to the monopoly of the somewhat sterile

principle of association appear as objections to phenomenalism in

psychology, and voluntaristic theories, especially those which work

with the teleological category of apperception, are put in its place.

But without returning to apperceptionism we can overcome the

one-sidedness of associationism if full use is made of the means which

the world of phenomena offers to theory. The insufficiency of

associationism disappears if the content of consciousness is

considered as variable not only as to