ABSTRACT
This book will be devoted to a discussion of mental events: how we see colors and hear tones, how our fantasy operates, how we acquire and lose the contents of memory, how our emotions arise, how human thinking develops knowledge from existing knowledge and how our will achieves its goals. It is the task of experimental psychologists to observe these and similar processes, to study them in detail, and to discover the laws which govern them. Other investigators, such as philosophers, are concerned with questions of the following sort: Where do mental experiences come from? What is mind? Is the mind spiritual, immortal, and possessed with freedom? How are mind and body related? The characteristic distinction between the interests of the philosopher and the interests of the experimental psychologist is obvious. The experimental psychologist investigates the more or less isolated facts of mental life, the how of psychical phenomena, while the philosopher, on the other hand, concerns himself with questions of the type mentioned above. His proper object of investigation is mind as the original foundation of conscious phenomena.
