United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is necessary to remember that experimental psychology was established in 1860 by Fechner, who was a physicist accustomed to experiment on things, not on living creatures, and who merely adapted the methods employed in physics to psychical measurements, thus founding psycho-physics.
Herbart's mathematical psychology was wrecked by this insurmountable difficulty. The demand for exactness which it raised, but which it was unable to satisfy with the means at its disposal, has recently been renewed, and has led to assured results in psycho-physics, which works on a different basis and with ingenious methods of measurement.
In the academic world, we do not cast a man out of his mathematical chair because he can also work in astro-physics or in psycho-physics. If he can pursue advanced research in an allied or applied field, it will help him in his regular and prescribed work.
It has already doubtless been realized that one of the needs of the future is a psychical laboratory, specially adapted for all kinds of experimental psychology and psycho-physics...."
But self-knowledge does not imply, either in the Greek or Japanese teaching, knowledge of the physical part of man, not his anatomy or his psycho-physics; knowledge was to be of a moral kind, the introspection of our moral nature.
Moreover, Fechner does not fail to connect his psycho-physics, the presuppositions and results of which have recently been questioned in several quarters, with his metaphysical conclusions. That which appears to us as the external world of matter, is nothing but a universal consciousness which overlaps and influences our individual consciousness. This is Spinozism idealistically interpreted.
After psycho-physics, psycho-physiology was introduced by Wundt. Wundt, being a physiologist, applied the methods of study proper to physiological functions to psychical study. He did not make the exact metrical instrument his aim; but he measured nervous reactions exactly in time.
Weber's results were definite enough and striking enough, yet they failed to attract any considerable measure of attention until they were revived and extended by Fechner and brought before the world in the famous work on psycho-physics. Then they precipitated a veritable melee. He pronounced Weber's discovery the fundamental law of psycho-physics.
Word Of The Day