Nevertheless we ought
not to forget the experience through which general experimental
psychology has gone in the last few decades. When the first
experiments were undertaken in order to deal systematically with the
mental life, the friends of this new science and its opponents agreed,
on the whole, in the belief that certainly only the most elementary
phenomena of consciousness, the sensations and the reactions of
impulses, would be accessible to the new method. The opponents
naturally compared this modest field with the great problems of the
mental totality, and therefore ridiculed the new narrow task as
unimportant. The friends, on the other hand, were eager to follow the
fresh path, because they were content to gain real exactitude by the
experiment at least in these simplest questions. Yet as soon as the
new independent workshops were established for the young science, it
was discovered that the method was able to open fields in which no one
had anticipated its usefulness. The experiments turned to the problems
of attention, of memory, of imagination, of feeling, of judgment, of
character, of aesthetic experience and so on. It is not improbable that
the method of the economic psychological experiment may also quickly
lead beyond the more elementary problems, as soon as it is
systematically applied, and then it, too, may conquer regions of
inquiry in which to-day no exact calculation of the psychological
factors seems possible.
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