THE IMPORTANCE OF SENSATIONS

Since man first became interested in the processes taking place in his own mind, his dreams and emotions and thoughts, he has wondered if he could understand these relatively elusive processes as thoroughly as he could the more stable facts of the material universe. And ever since Epictetus and Aristotle began to collect the facts of mental life and formulate them into the laws which were later to become the basis of the study of psychology, philosophers and theologians and natural scientists have debated whether or not this study of the human mind constituted a real science. The champions of both sides of the question are worthy of attention.

Epictetus and Aristotle considered their psychological investigations strictly scientific. Yet as fascinating and as authoritative as their studies appeared to their contemporaries, their opinions lose value today, because none of the discipline with which they were familiar are accounted scientific by exact modern standards.

From the scientific movement to which Descartes gave such impetus in the seventeenth century until the time of Herbert Spencer, psychology was not considered a science but a mystical preoccupation not unlike theology. In Diderot’s Encyclopedia of 1752 we find psychology defined as that branch of philosophy which “defines the human soul and gives an account of its activities.” Bacon also classified psychology as one of the philosophies of the soul. With it he included soothsaying and witchcraft which in his day were supposed to be the two most practical applications of psychology.

Comte was the first authority to place psychology among the natural sciences instead of the philosophies. But curiously enough the one branch of psychology which he considered exact enough to be classified along with biology was the one branch of psychology which today is thought to be completely and absolutely unscientific—phrenology.

Since the time of Spencer, who accepted psychology as an independent science following biology and preparatory to sociology, its scientific status has been fairly generally accepted. Still there have been some violent dissenters. Kant, in particular, prophesied that there could never be a science of psychology because mental phenomena could never be treated mathematically. And the old debate is still raging. John B. Watson when he adopted his behavioristic platform threw aside all of the laboriously got results of the introspectionists and functionalists because he considered them inexact, and irremediably so, when compared with the results of the biologists and chemists. Many of these same introspectionists and functionalists feel that the revolutionary and far-reaching theories of Freud and Jung and Adler are too hypothetical and too general ever to form the basis of an exact science.

Yet in one field all but the most radically behavioristic admit that traditional psychology has justified its scientific claims. This field comprises the human sensations.