ABSTRACT
At the period when I received what was in those days called an education, psychology was still, to all intents and purposes, a branch of philosophy. Mental events were divided into knowing, willing, and feeling. Attempts were made to define perception and sensation, and in general the subject was one for verbal analysis of concepts that the philosophers had rendered familiar though not intelligible. It is true that every textbook began with an account of the brain, but having given that account, it made no further allusion to it. It is true also that there existed a form of psychology which made use of laboratories and attempted to be very scientific. This form was practised especially by Wundt and his disciples. You showed a man a picture of a dog, and said: “What’s that?” You then measured carefully how long it took him to say “dog”; in this way much valuable information was amassed. But strange to say, in spite of the apparatus of measurement, it turned out that there was nothing to do with this valuable information except to forget it. Every new science is hampered by too slavish an imitation of the technique of some
older science. No doubt measurement is the hall-mark of an exact science and therefore scientifically-minded psychologists looked about for something measurable connected with their subject-matter. They were wrong, however, in thinking that time intervals were the appropriate thing to measure: this position, as it turned out, is occupied by the saliva of dogs.
