Experimental psychology, of course, relies on experiments conducted under
the eyes of the expert, for example, by hypnotism or otherwise, under Dr.
Hack Tuke, Professor James, M. Richet, M. Janet. The evidence is
the conduct rather than the statements of the subject. There is
also physiological experiment, by vivisection (I regret to say) and
post-mortem dissection. But non-experimental psychology reposes on the
self-examination of the student, and on the statements of psychological
experiences made to him by persons whom he thinks he can trust. The
psychologist, however, if he be, as Mr. Galton says, 'unimaginative in the
strict but unusual sense of that ambiguous word,' needs Mr. Galton's 'word
of warning.' He is asked 'to resist a too frequent tendency to assume that
the minds of every other sane and healthy person must be like his own. The
psychologist should inquire into the minds of others as he should into
those of animals of different races, and be prepared to find much to which
his own experience can afford little if any clue.'[5] Mr. Galton had to
warn the unimaginative psychologist in this way, because he was about to
unfold his discovery of the faculty which presents numbers to some minds
as visualised coloured numerals, 'so vivid as to be undistinguishable from
reality, except by the aid of accidental circumstances.'
Mr. Galton also found in his inquiries that occasional hallucinations of
the sane are much more prevalent than he had supposed, or than science had
ever taken into account. All this was entirely new to psychologists,
many of whom still (at least many popular psychologists of the press)
appear to be unacquainted with the circumstances. One of them informed me,
quite gravely, that '_he_ never had an hallucination,' therefore--_his_
mind being sane and healthy--the inference seemed to be that no sane and
healthy mind was ever hallucinated. Mr. Galton has replied to _that_
argument! His reply covers, logically, the whole field of psychological
faculties little regarded, for example, by Mr. Sully, who is not exactly
an imaginative psychologist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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