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We should have to discuss the various kinds of fatigue and exhaustion, the conditions of restoration, and the whole group of related problems of psychophysics. But this is the one field which has been thoroughly ploughed over by science and by practical life in the course of the last decades. No new suggestion and no new hint of the importance of the problem is needed here.
Investigations on the psychophysics of movement and the influences which lead toward making the movement too large or too small have played an important rôle in the psychological laboratories for several decades. It was recognized early that the mistakes which are made in reproducing a movement may spring from two different sources.
To approach, at least, this field of human labor a careful investigation of the psychophysics of sewing has been started in my laboratory. The sewing work is done, with the left hand supported, and the right hand connected with a system of levers which make a graphic record of every movement on the smoked surface of a revolving drum.
But this implies a distrust of physical human nature as deep-seated and radical as that of Calvinism for the unregenerate heart, against which modern common sense, so often the best muse of both psychophysics and pedagogy, protests. Individual prescription is here as imperative as it is difficult.
We had to speak of the psychophysics of sleep when we discussed the theoretical relation of sleep to hypnotism and insisted that it is misleading to consider hypnosis simply as partial sleep. We claimed a fundamental difference between the selective inhibition in hypnotism and the general reduction of functions in sleep.
Biological science, which a generation ago was supposed to be at the antipodes of exact science, is becoming more and more exact, and is cultivated by methods which are developed and taught by mathematicians. Psychophysics the study of the operations of the mind by physical apparatus of the same general nature as that used by the chemist and physicist is now an established branch of research.
That title introduced a new word into the vocabulary of science. Fechner explained it by saying, "I mean by psychophysics an exact theory of the relation between spirit and body, and, in a general way, between the physical and the psychic worlds." The title became famous and the brunt of many a controversy.
A book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics many persons consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these books; a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is considered by some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science, must be included among these other performances.
The same decade that witnessed the publication of the Origin of Species also witnessed the birth of another great book, little known except to the specialist, and yet destined to achieve immortality. This book is the Elements of Psychophysics, the work of the German scientist Fechner.
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