Psychological conceptions in other sciences : the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford 14 May, 1929 / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Myers, Charles S. (Charles Samuel), 1873-1946.
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Psychological conceptions in other sciences : the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford 14 May, 1929 / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    stimuli bears to that strength. We cannot, save in¬ directly, judge that one sensation has twice or half the intensity of another. All that we can say in the comparison of intensities of sensations is that one is equal to, greater than, or less than another, or that the difference in inten¬ sity between one pair of sensations is equal to, greater than, or less than the difference between a second pair. We can no more add together two sensations of different intensity than we can add together two pleasures or pains. But by methods which depended on purely mathemati¬ cal and apparently logical manipulations, but were wholly unwarranted and contradicted by psychological considera¬ tions, the physicist Fechner claimed to prove that the absolute intensity of one sensation could be compared with that of another and that it is proportional to the logarithm of the strength of its stimulus. Here we have a second example of the vain attempt of the physicist to replace the relative by the absolute in psychology. It is perhaps idle to ask whether, if Physics had been willing to learn a lesson from Psychology, instead of trying to teach it one, its present position might have been sooner reached. We now find Newton’s absolute time and absolute space discarded and replaced by concepts of relativity. There is now for physicists no absolute location of objects in space: their location varies with, and is rela¬ tive to, the surrounding frame of space. Time is now in¬ ferred to run more slowly in such a place as the sun than with us, because the sun’s mass is greater than that of the earth. Regarded as a mathematical point, an instant of time has vanished for the physicist: the psychologist’s conception of the enduring * specious present ’ seems to be replacing it. And the question has been lately raised whether matter itself is not for the physicist merely the way in which our minds perceive certain aspects of its structure. Indeed Physics is now largely engaged in dealing with geometrical structure rather than with material substance. Substance, which was once supposed to distinguish Matter so clearly from Mind, has gone from electrons, quanta, and