ABSTRACT
D. F. Johnson gave a detailed account of the lack of impact of psychophysics on late nineteenth-century British psychology. In the fourth section, pages 533–549, William James came to grips with Gustav Theodor Fechner’s theory of discriminative sensibility, that is, Fechner’s psychophysics. James contended that Fechner’s originality consisted mainly in his theoretical interpretation of Ernst Heinrich Weber’s Law. An interesting account of how the word “psychophysics” had its domain of reference extended from “Fechnerian psychophysics” to “sensory science in general” was provided by P. Whittle. James draws the interesting conclusion that “two processes which occasion feelings quite indistinguishable to direct consciousness may nevertheless be each allied with disparate associates both of a sensorial and of a motor kind”. James famously prognosticated a dull future for psychology if psychophysics were to continue to dominate university-based research as much as it had in the previous 30 years.
