e all are not agreed upon the nature and
source of the observed phenomena. Their names are, moreover,
already identified with modern scientific research and theory,
so that to associate them with experimental psychology would
be to lend colour to the idea that modern science has recognized
this branch of knowledge. Nothing, perhaps, is further from
the fact, and while it cannot in any way be regarded as derogatory
to the highest scientist to be associated with others, of less
scientific attainment but of equal integrity, in this comparatively new
field of enquiry, it may lead to popular error to institute a connection.
It is still fresh in the mind how the Darwinian hypothesis was utterly
misconceived by the popular mind, the suggestion that man was descended
from the apes being generally quoted as a correct expression of
Darwin's theory, whereas he never suggested any such thing,
but that man and the apes had a common ancestor, which makes
of the ape rather a degenerate lemur than a human ancestor.
Other and more prevalent errors will occur to the reader, these
being due to the use of what is called "the evidence of the
senses"; and of all criteria the evidence of sensation is perhaps
the most faulty. Logical inference from deductive or inductive
reasoning has often enough been a good monitor to sense-perception,
and has, moreover, pioneered the man of science to correct
knowledge on more than one occasion. But as far as we know
or can learn from the history of human knowledge, our senses
have been the chiefest source of error. It is with considerable
caution that the scientist employs the evidence from sense
alone, and in the study of experimental psychology it is the sense
which has first to be corrected, and which, in fact, forms the great
factor in the equation. A person informs me that he can see a vision in
the crystal ball before him, and although I am in the same relation
with the "field" as he, I cannot see anything except accountable
reflections. This fact does not give any room for contradicting him or
any right to infer that it is all imagination. It is futile to say the
vision does not exist. If he sees it, it does exist so far as he is
concerned. There is no more a universal community of sensation than of
thought. When I am at work my own thought is more real than any
impression received through the sense organs. It is louder than the
babel of voices or the strains of instrumental music, and more
conspic