“But the danger which threatens experimental psychology,” says Münsterberg, “is that, in investigating details, the connexion with questions of principle may be so lost sight of that the investigation finally lands at objects scientifically quite worthless(43). Psychology forgets only too easily that all those numerical statistics which experiment allows us to form are only means for psychological analysis and interpretation, not ends in themselves. It piles up numbers and numbers, and fails to ask whether the results so formed have any theoretical value whatever: it seeks answers before a question has been clearly and distinctly framed; whereas the value of experimental answers always depends on the exactitude with which the question is put. Let me remind the reader, how one inquirer after another made many thousand experiments on the estimation of small intervals of time, without a single one of them raising the question what the precise point was which these experiments sought to measure, what was the psychological occurrence in the case, or what psychological phenomena were employed as the standard of time-intervals. And so each had his own arbitrary standard of measurement, each of them piled up mountains of numbers, each demonstrated that his predecessor was wrong; but neither Estel nor Mehner have carried the problem of the time-sense a single step further. “This must be all changed, if we are not to drift into the barrenest scholastic.... Everywhere out of the correct perception that problems of principle demand the investigation of detailed phenomena, and that the latter investigation must proceed in comparative independence of the question of principles, there has grown the false belief that the description of detail phenomena is the ultimate aim of science. And so, side by side with details which are of importance to principles, we have others, utterly indifferent and theoretically worthless, treated with the same zeal. To the solution of their barren problems the old Schoolmen applied a certain acuteness; but in order to turn out masses of numbers from barren experiments, all that is needed is a certain insensibility to fits of ennui. Let numbers be less collected for their own sake: and instead, let the problems be so brought to a point that the answers may possess the character of principles. Let each experiment be founded on far more theoretical considerations, then the number of the experiments may be largely diminished(44).”