Psychologists now seem to despair of
obtaining any large results from the science. Mr. E.W. Scripture in
"The New Psychology" says, in 1897, "It cannot dissect the mind with a
scalpel, it cannot hope to find a startling principle of mental life."
If psychological experiment could be presented somewhat apart from its
technicalities, and if minds could play freely round its discoveries,
how much more interesting it would be felt to be by the general
public! The great experimental worker, Mr. J. Mck Cattell has given[2]
some clear idea of the results he obtained by analysing and measuring
sensations. The physical processes, which accompany sensations of
sound and light for instance, unlike as they must be to sensations,
being facts of matter in motion, yet share with them this
characteristic, that sensations also have each an _order in time_, the
mental processes can be measured, equally with the physical. Of course
measuring sensations is only measuring "the outside of the mind"--but
it produces among others one very suggestive result: "that as time is
relative, if all things moved much more slowly or quickly than at
present, we should not feel any change at all. But if our objective
measures of time moved twice as fast, whilst physiological movements
and mental processes went on at the same rate as now, the days of our
years would be seven score, instead of three score years and ten, yet
we should not be any the older, or live any the longer.
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