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lategories in Contemporai 
 Psychology 
 
 :udy in the Psychology of Thinking 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 SirBMITTED TO THE FACULTY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 GRADUATE SCHOOL 01 ARTS AND LITERATURE 
 
 IN CANDIDACY FOR Till- hi GREE 01 
 
 DOCTOR 01 PHILOSOPin 
 
 DEPARTMEN1 OF PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 CARL RAHN 
 
 'ubli-hed u> No 67 ol the MoNOGfl %i hs 01 
 
 1913 
 
 OLOGICAL RK • i » v. 
 
Zbc Tllntversits ot Gbtcago 
 
 FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 
 
 The Relation of Sensation to other 
 
 Categories in Contemporary 
 
 Psychology 
 
 A Study in the Psychology of Thinking 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE 
 
 IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF 
 
 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 CARL RAHN 
 
 (Published as No. 67 of the Monographs of the Psychological Review) 
 
 1913 
 
<$\~ 
 
 1914 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I The problem of the psychology of thinking and the 
 
 structural and functional point of view I 
 
 II The categories of content and activity in the system 
 
 of Stumpf 2 
 
 III Stumpf's criteria for distinguishing between Funk- 
 
 tion (activity) and phenomenal content 7 
 
 IV Stumpf's example of independent variation of Funk- 
 
 tion while the phenomenal sensory content re- 
 mains constant • . 7 
 
 V James versus Stumpf ; James contending that the act 
 
 of analysis modifies the sensory experience 10 
 
 VI Comparison of the usually recognized sensory "at- 
 tributes" in the two cases ....•• 11 
 
 VII "Clearness" as an attribute of Titchener's "Sensa- 
 tion," of Stumpf's "Funktion" of Wundt's "Com- 
 pound" • • 16 
 
 VIII Titchener's definition of "sensation element" 19 
 
 IX Methods of abstracting the "attributes and of assign- 
 ing them to various "elements" 22 
 
 X Interrelation of the attributes of the sensory ele- 
 ments : their "inseparability" ; quality as the 
 "body" of the sensation ; their difference in atten- 
 
 tional clearness 25 
 
 XI The status of clearness as an attribute of sensation 
 anomalous in that two different degrees of clear- 
 ness are possible within the "same" elementary 
 
 sensation 29 
 
 XII Clearness apparently unlike other "attributes" in an- 
 other respect: not all degrees of clearness can be 
 attended to, "inspected," without changing the 
 "process" 31 
 
 XIII Clearness as an attribute of activity, of Funktion, that 
 
 is given, according to Stumpf, "by another direc- 
 tion of consciousness" than are the "sensations" or 
 their "attributes" 35 
 
 XIV Titchener on the activity aspect of consciousness .... 39 
 XV The difference in the direction of consciousness, by 
 
 means of which attributes of experience are ap- 
 prehended, as a basis for distinguishing ultimate 
 
 categories 41 
 
 XVI "Mode of behavior" of various aspects of conscious- 
 ness when attended to, as a possible basis of classi- 
 fication of psychological categories. Application 
 to the categories of (1) Funktion or "attitude," 
 
 (2) percept and idea, (3) sensation 44 
 
 XVII The distinction between the actual "feel" of an atti- 
 tude and the sensory precipitant 45 
 
 XVIII The differentiation of "stimulus" and "meaning" as- 
 pects of percepts and ideas 48 
 
XIX The "behavior" of the "meaning" of percept and idea 
 
 under the influence of the introspective purpose. . 49 
 XX The behavior of the sensation when attended to. . . . 52 
 
 XXI The behavior of the "attribute" 59 
 
 XXII The modification of consciousness under the influ- 
 ence of the psychological purpose as the opening 
 of an important field for psychology 65 
 
 XXIII The rise of the category of a static structural sensa- 
 
 tion element. The inadequacy of such a category 
 as shown by the introduction of the new "non- 
 sensory," "imageless" categories 67 
 
 XXIV "Sensation" in process of re-definition : Kulpe, Angell, 
 
 Watt, Meumann 74 
 
 XXV Kiilpe's distinction between "sensation" and "con- 
 sciousness, of sensation" 81 
 
 XXVI The sensation of the "inseparable attributes," that 
 "never means," is found inadequate for the pur- 
 pose of describing what the psychologist notes in 
 the actual thought process. The rise of new 
 
 categories 83 
 
 XXVII Kiilpe's abstrakte Vorstellung; Stumpf's Gebilde; 
 
 Biihler's Gedanke; Woodworth's percept-quality 84 
 
 XXVIII Biihler's criterion of the "sensory" 88 
 
 XXIX Biihler on the fortuity and irrelevancy of much sen- 
 sory content 90 
 
 XXX The relation of the sensory and non-sensory factors 
 
 in Biihler's system. . . 92 
 
 XXXI Locke's "idea of substance" as the precursor of some 
 contemporary and "non-sensory" categories: 
 Biihler's "Intention" Schultze's "pseudo-sub- 
 stance," T. V. Moore's "something." Woodworth's 
 
 "thinghood" 94 
 
 XXXII A psychological analysis of the rise of the philo- 
 sophic problem of the Ding an sich. The "that- 
 ness" of the sensation as a special case of the 
 general problem of "objective reference" 101 
 
 XXXIII "Sensations" as facts of actual consciousness are not 
 
 to be stated as ultimates of fixed character but as 
 developments within the individual's experience. . 104 
 
 XXXIV The "sensation element" and the "thought element" 
 
 in relation to the conception of consciousness as a 
 somewhat capable of a "static analysis." The phil- 
 osophic antecedents of the two elements. The dif- 
 ference in the number of classes of cognitive 
 elements as being due to a difference in methods 
 
 of procedure 108 
 
 XXXV Cognitive consciousness as re-presentative and as 
 
 representative 115 
 
 XXXVI The relation of "reection" to conscious processes.. 120 
 XXXVII Conclusion 125 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These pages do not pretend to be a survey of the work done 
 upon the problem of the psychology of thinking, such as has 
 been given to us in Professor Titchener's admirable "Lectures". 
 They are rather an attempt to apply the method of immanent 
 criticism in searching out the implications of the category of 
 Sensation as it appears in contemporary discussions of the prob- 
 lem. This method was wittingly adopted — in spite of limita- 
 tions which it imposed and in spite of the difficulties which it 
 offered from the point of view of formal presentation — on 
 account of the promise it held of leading the inquirer into the 
 heart of the problem of the psychology of thinking. 
 
 If this paper should eventually be found to contain any con- 
 tribution to the problem, it will be obvious at once that the stim- 
 ulus which gave rise to it lies in earlier contributors to the 
 subject, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness not 
 only to those whose contributions have been critically examined 
 in these pages, but also to the many others not specifically dwelt 
 upon, among them Marbe, Messer, Orth, Mayer, Kakise, Ach, 
 Schwiete, and finally Binet who grappled persistently with the 
 problem, and thought profoundly concerning it, for many years. 
 
 Personally, I am indebted to Professor Oswald Kiilpe for his 
 many courtesies extended to me while the immediate problem 
 of this paper was forming in my mind during my stay at the 
 University of Bonn; to Professor C. Judson Herrick for his 
 cheerful readiness to discuss questions of neurology that arose 
 persistently during the course of the inquiry ; to Professor Harvey 
 Carr and Dr. Stella B. Vincent for the helpful suggestions that 
 grew out of our pleasant conferences. It is to Professor James 
 R. Angell that I am beholden for constant encouragement in the 
 pursuit of this task, and for the inspiration that lies in the ideal 
 of scholarly independence of thought. C. R. 
 
It is the purpose of this paper to consider an aspect of psycho- 
 logical inquiry as it has been developed especially by a number of 
 workers both in America and Germany. These latter are com- 
 monly referred to as the Denkpsychologen, yet it would be 
 misleading to suppose that their work is of significance only 
 for the psychology of the logical processes. Nay, it would affect 
 our whole conception of psychic process and psychic content. 
 When we seek to correlate it with the points of view that are 
 familiar to us in America, we note at first blush that in method 
 it has much in common with so-called structural psychology, 
 whilst the problems which it attacks and the questions which it 
 seeks to answer are conceived in a spirit closely akin to the temper 
 of the functionalist. To elucidate and qualify this statement 
 will be part of the burden of the following pages, and it is the 
 earnest hope of the writer that they may contribute in some 
 measure to finding the common ground of these various 
 "schools" in their pursuit of a common task. 
 
 Without further introduction we shall proceed to an exam- 
 ination of the sort of problems the movement in question 
 proposes to itself, and its methods of attacking them. As we 
 go along let us note bit by bit the meaning which the various 
 writers put into the psychological terms that they employ. For 
 by doing this it will be easier to note in how far any differences 
 which may be found ultimately to exist between the various 
 schools, are due to differences in point of view as to the nature 
 of consciousness, or to differences in methods of obtaining and 
 interpreting data. Wherever in this paper we are using quotations 
 from the authors under discussion, we shall, when necessary, 
 use the German or French terms of the original, otherwise we 
 shall seek to give an adequate translation in English, sacrificing, 
 where needful, elegance of diction to accuracy of rendering. 
 
2 CARL RAHN 
 
 II 
 
 Instead of launching upon an historical account of the work 
 on the thought processes in its specifically experimental phases, 
 we shall consider first a treatise by Stumpf, entitled Erschein- 
 ungen und psychische Funktionen, which partakes primarily of 
 the nature of a theoretical exposition of a consistent point of 
 view — a programme for giving context to problems, rather than 
 a completely fulfilled and grounded system. It therefore lends 
 itself admirably also to our purposes, for it gives a setting in 
 the light of which the discussion of the more specific experimental 
 efforts can be more fully appreciated. 
 
 Let us consider what Stumpf alleges he finds on turning to 
 the study of consciousness. For him the total content, the 
 "given" of consciousness, falls into three groups. ( i ) There are 
 the phenomena, the Erscheinnngen, which correspond closely to 
 the sensation, the image, and, tentatively, the simple affective 
 elements of current structural psychology. (2) Introspection, 
 for Stumpf, further reveals a consciousness of psychic activities, 
 psychische Funktionen, of which we may be directly aware, and 
 the consciousness of which cannot be reduced to sensation and 
 affective elements. Willing, emotion, judging, conceiving, to 
 name only a few, are processes of which we are immediately 
 aware : they are given in the same indefinable consciousness and 
 in the same sense in which sensations and feelings are given. 
 (3) Then there are the relations, Verh'dltnisse, which constitute 
 the third type of given. These relations exist, a, between the 
 psychic elements of sensation, image and feeling, which Stumpf 
 comprehends under the term Erscheinungen — a word which we 
 shall render in the English as phenomena. These relations 
 are not something that is added to phenomena by our minds 
 through the operation of mental activities upon the sensory or 
 affective content — no, they are conceived by Stumpf to be "given" 
 in consciousness in the same sense in which sensations and 
 feelings are given. They belong to the material with which 
 psychic activities operate, but do not come under the head of 
 psychic activities, nor are they products of these. 49 Another 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 3 
 
 class of relations, b, is composed of those between phenomena 
 and Funktionen, and between Funktionen themselves. 52 These 
 three categories, then, the phenomena, the psychic Funktionen, 
 and the relations, constitute for Stumpf the immediately given 
 of consciousness. We shall have occasion, in another connection, 
 to refer to a fourth category, the "structures" (Gebilde), which 
 Stumpf does not, however, regard as being "immediately given" 
 in the same sense as the other three. 63 
 
 For Stumpf the immediately given (das unmittelbar Gegebene) 
 is that which strikes one immediately as matter-in-fact (was 
 als Tatsache unmittelbar einleuchtet) . That which is to make 
 this immediate appeal as matter-of-fact must be such that it 
 can come within awareness. ( Was als Tatsache unmittelbar einr- 
 leuchten soil, muss wahrnehmbar sein). 51 It is our purpose to 
 note the implications of this conception of the immediately given 
 and to see in how far Stumpf adheres to it in the upbuilding of 
 his psychological system, especially with reference to his treat- 
 ment of the presence of phenomena and activities in consciousness. 
 It is the content-character of these two factors, the "givenness" 
 of sensation and affective elements, i. e. of phenomena (Erschein- 
 ungen), on the one hand, and of psychic activities on the other, 
 that shall engage our attention for the present, and we will leave 
 the discussion of the presence of relational elements in conscious- 
 ness, which is not an unfamiliar doctrine, for later consideration. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to expatiate on what Stumpf may mean 
 by saying that Erscheinungen, sensory and affective elements 
 of the content of consciousness, are immediately given. It is 
 simply the structuralistic doctrine that under certain conditions we 
 may become aware of redness and blueness, of the tones that 
 make up a clang, of sweetness, of pressure and cold sensations, — 
 that we may become aware of these as parts of the mass of 
 conscious experience of any moment. His classification of 
 phenomenal elements is as follows: a, the sensation contents 
 (Inhalte der Sinnesempfindung) , including the spatial extensity 
 and distribution of visual and contact impressions, — tentatively 
 also temporal duration and sequence; b, memory images 
 (Gedachtnisbilder) , the 'merely imaged' colors, tones, etc. 
 
4 CARL RAHN 
 
 Stumpf would leave out of consideration for the time being the 
 classification of the pleasure-pain elements involved in sensory 
 processes, on account of their still questionable status, though 
 he is willing to see them subordinated under the head of phenom- 
 ena, not as attributes of these, but as a special class. 49 It is not 
 the classification of the phenomenal elements that shall interest 
 us most, but rather their status with reference to the whole of 
 consciousness and their relation to what Stumpf calls the Funk- 
 tionen, that constitute for him another group of psychic givens. 
 
 Psychic activities (psychische Funktionen, Akte, Erlebnisse, 
 Zustande) are such experiences as the awareness of phenomena, 
 the combination of phenomena into complexes, the formation of 
 concepts, apprehending and judging, desiring, willing and emo- 
 tional states. 50 52 Funktion is here not used in the sense of a 
 result attained through a process, as when we say that circula- 
 tion is a function of the expansion and contraction of the heart, 
 but in the sense of an activity, of a process, in the sense in which 
 the contraction of the heart is an organic function. It is in 
 the former sense that Stumpf believes himself to be justified in 
 interpreting the term function as used by some American psychol- 
 ogists, such as Dewey. 50 Whether such an interpretation is 
 correct is questionable; yet his own use of the term Funktion is 
 brought out by his reference : the Funktionen are the activity 
 phases of consciousness, of which we may become immediately 
 aware. In this, Stumpf believes, his use of the term differs 
 from that of Dewey. In order to differentiate the two uses of 
 the term in these pages we shall use the German form when the 
 term is used in Stumpf's sense, and the English form when we 
 refer to the meaning connected with the term by the American 
 functionalists. Limiting ourselves to a discussion of the psycho- 
 logical uses of the term, we note the following with reference to 
 the different shades of meaning connected with it. Both Stumpf 
 and the American functionalists use the term with reference to 
 the activity aspect of consciousness. But where such psychologists 
 as Stumpf seek to understand this activity aspect by considering 
 the psychic life by itself, the functionalist seeks to do justice 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 5 
 
 to the process aspect by considering consciousness with reference 
 to a biological setting. 5 Stumpf looks inward and there in con- 
 sciousness is a complex of sensory elements, let us say, which 
 together constitute the object of regard. For Stumpf it is a 
 psychic Funktion, an activity of which we may become immed- 
 iately aware, that is operative in binding together these elements 
 into a figure, a rhythm, or a melody. Or again, given the same 
 object, in terms of the same sensory content, we may at one time 
 take a positive volitional attitude toward it, at another time a 
 negative one. 63 The difference in the two states, then, is not a 
 difference in the sensory content of consciousness, but a differ- 
 ence in the Funktionen involved. It is the Funktion as it is 
 immediately given in consciousness, that, as a part of the pattern 
 of consciousness, constitutes the difference in the pattern in the 
 two cases. There is, to be sure a complication with other Funk- 
 tionen, says Stumpf, intellectual and emotional, but it is important 
 only to note that it is not the phenomenal content that is different 
 in the two cases, but the Funktionen that operate upon that content. 
 With Stumpf, therefore, the category of Funktion is a structural 
 category insofar as it is a content among other contents, though 
 he would restrict the use of the term content (Inhalt), to the 
 phenomena (Erscheinungen) , whereas the Funktionen are acts, 
 of which we may become aware, which may be perceived by 
 directing attention in "another way". Yet on page 15 of his 
 monograph the Funktionen are referred to as contents. And like 
 these others they, too, are "immediately given", though different 
 in kind. In this sense, says Stumpf, there has been a discussion 
 of awareness and perception of psychic Funktionen ever since 
 Locke and Leibnitz, to say nothing of earlier thinkers. "These 
 writers deny that the consciousness of seeing can be reduced to 
 memory phenomena accompanying the color phenomena, memory 
 images representing the organ of sight, etc. Still less are such 
 interpretations possible in the case of the consciousness of judging 
 and willing. They are convinced that they apprehend psychic 
 activity in the very process itself, whereas colors and tones are 
 apprehended merely as contents of an act of awareness, (Wahr- 
 
6 CARL RAHN 
 
 nehmungsakt) , that is, of a particular class of psychic Funktionen. 
 According to this view the phenomenal content and the act are 
 interrelated in a manner still to be described, but are not reducible 
 one to the other. . . . It is to be borne in mind that the assertion 
 of the awareness of psychic Funktionen as Funktionen does not 
 necessarily include a denial of unconscious psychic Funktionen."** 6 
 Thus Stumpf's conception of Funktion has its rise. We have 
 said that he looks inward and there in consciousness he discerns 
 sensory and feeling content on the one hand, and "acts" which 
 operate with these, on the other. Contrasted with this mode of 
 procedure, the so-called functional psychologist looks at con- 
 sciousness with reference to the life-setting of the individual. He 
 tries to understand what function consciousness serves in the 
 total life-process, as it is represented in the adaptation of the 
 individual form to its environment. He asks : What does a 
 given conscious experience do in the adaptive process, and how 
 does it do it? 6 It is here that his conception of psychic function 
 has had its rise. It considers, say a given image content, from the 
 point of view of the function which it serves in some phase of 
 adaptation involving consciousness. Examples of such phases 
 are experiences like perceiving, judging, willing and emotional 
 states. Introspectively, however, the setting in which the givgn 
 image appears in these phases of adaptive activity, need not 
 necessarily reveal anything at the periphery of the field of con- 
 sciousness that is qualitatively different in kind from the sensory 
 content of the image which is at the focus of attention and the 
 affective elements associated with it. If the question of the 
 awareness of process should become a problem for the function- 
 alist, say in the case of judgment, he need not necessarily look for 
 it as being given in consciousness in terms of mental texture other 
 than that already known to him in sensation and affection. 
 Having thus briefly sketched the essential features of the two 
 points of view, we shall leave further comparison for the present, 
 and return to a discussion of Stumpf's conception of the relation 
 between two of his categories of psychical givens, the Erschcin- 
 ungen and the Funktionen. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 7 
 
 III 
 
 The difference between Erscheinungen and Funktionen, says 
 Stumpf, is most striking. "No predicate of the one, unless it be 
 that of duration, can be attributed to the other. Nor do the 
 Funktionen possess intensity in the same sense as do tones and 
 odors." They have their own peculiar attributes, "the clearness 
 of awareness, the evidence of judgments, degrees of generality 
 in the case of conception. If in the case of the emotional Funk- 
 tionen there should be found somewhat analogous to the intensity 
 peculiar to sensory impressions, one need not deny it, but then we 
 have to deal merely with an analogy, and not with an intensity in 
 the same sense of the word as in the case of sensation." 54 
 
 Two criteria for distinguishing between Erscheinungen and 
 Funktionen are given by Stumpf. (1) Each is independently 
 variable over against the other. 56 (2) "No predicate of the 
 one, unless it be that of duration, can be attributed to the other." 54 
 And we are inclined to find implicit in his exposition a third 
 criterion that appears to have been operative to a certain extent 
 in bringing Stumpf to his distinction between these two types of 
 ultimates : the mode in which they are apprehended. They are 
 apprehended by "different directions of consciousness". The 
 phenomena (Erscheinungen) "stand over against us as somewhat 
 objective, that possesses its own laws, a somewhat that we have 
 merely to describe and acknowledge". The Funktionen, however, 
 we are told, are given us by "another direction of conscious- 
 ness". 57 While Stumpf does not enlarge upon this third criterion, 
 viz., mode of behavior under introspection, we still find it implicit 
 in his statement that the Funktionen are apprehended by a 
 "direction of consciousness" other than that by which the phe- 
 nomena are apprehended. 
 
 IV 
 
 Stumpf believes that he can postulate on introspective grounds 
 the possibility of independent variability of either the Erschein- 
 
8 CARL RAHN 
 
 ungen or the Funktionen, without a variation in the one being 
 necessarily accompanied be a concomitant change in the other. It 
 will not be unprofitable, we believe, to follow him a little way 
 while he is trying to make his point, for it will help us somewhat 
 in understanding how he comes to believe that he is justified in 
 regarding the Funktionen as being immediately given, and also 
 to understand just what phases of consciousness he would sub- 
 sume under that concept. Let us consider first his instances in 
 which he believes a change in Funktion to occur while the Er- 
 scheinungen, the sensory content, remains unchanged. He first 
 takes up a case in which the Funktion of awareness is involved. 
 Awareness is apparently taken by Stumpf in the sense of "simple 
 apprehension" the most primitive of psychic Funktionen, the 
 process "by which parts or relations are precipitated out of the 
 undifferentiated chaos of phenomena". 57 * It is the Funktion 
 that precedes the judgment, whether implicit or explicit. "To be 
 sure," he continues, "there usually goes with it an instinctive 
 positing of the part noted, and later it is often accompanied also 
 by a conceptual judgment concerning the existence of the part or 
 relation." The process of being aware (Wahrnchmcn, Bemerken, 
 N otiznehmen) , is for Stumpf to be differentiated carefully from 
 the Funktion of judgment and the "instinctive positing" just 
 mentioned. Awareness of phenomena of the first class, of sensory 
 content, he calls sensing (Empfinden), awareness of phenomena 
 of the second class, of images, he calls imagining (Vorstellcn).* 7 
 "Our thesis," says Stumpf, "applied to the case of sensory 
 awareness, asserts that in the transition from being unnoticed 
 to being noticed there need not necessarily be a change in the 
 phenomena, in the sensory content, itself. That which changes is 
 essentially of the nature of Funktion, of process. The transition, 
 putting it figuratively, consists in an amassing of consciousness 
 with reference to some part of the phenomenal content. Thus 
 when one tone of a chord is singled out, there need not be a change 
 in the chord as phenomenal content. What I apprehend at first as 
 an unanalysed clang, then as an analysed one, remains what it 
 was; so too the unified impression of some article of food, in 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY g 
 
 which later I note somewhat of sweetness, somewhat of sourness, 
 perhaps also an odor and a temperature quality ; so too the dermal 
 sensation which is later analysed into pressure, cold and pain 
 sensations, — these remain what they were. And it is not merely 
 the objective stimuli and the psysiological processes, but also, 
 I believe, the subjective phenomena (Erscheinungen) that may 
 remain the same, unchanged." 59 "To be sure," he continues, "in 
 most cases in which we say that a sensory impression appears 
 clearer, more distinct, and more 'transparent' with reference to 
 the total ordering of its contents, than a moment ago, there can 
 be shown numerous changes in associated imagery. . . ." There 
 is a quickening of the apperceptive process. A second view of a 
 picture allows it to be taken in with fewer and shorter stopping 
 points. The muscular sensations are reduced at least with refer- 
 ence to the duration attribute. But not all cases, he believes, 
 can be thus explained. Among them those just cited above. 
 Likewise the following: Coming from the theatre, rapt in 
 thought, we are aware in a vague way of the row of brilliant 
 street lamps, or of the strokes of the bell tolling the hour. We 
 now turn our attention directly to the lights, or to the further 
 strokes. "We will have to say to ourselves," continues Stumpf, 
 "that just a moment ago there also were lights and auditory 
 impressions of the same kind and in the same spatial or temporal 
 relations, incidentally also of the same intensity as those of which 
 we are now aware." What has changed in all these cases is not 
 the sensory content, according to Stumpf, but the Funktion. 
 Since we saw that the peculiar attribute of the Funktion or process 
 of awareness is the degree of clearness, we must infer that it is 
 that which has changed in all these cases. We recall that by way 
 of definition of this change, Stumpf had said that "the transition, 
 putting it figuratively, consists in an amassing of consciousness 
 with reference to some part of the phenomenal content". It 
 would appear that the factor in conscious experience which is the 
 basis for Stumpf 's judgment as to the immediate givenness of the 
 Funktion in the case of awareness is just this amassing of atten- 
 tion and holding it there. This much for clinching in a concrete 
 
io CARL RAHN 
 
 case the content of his idea of one of the Funktionen. We shall 
 revert to this anon, but for the present let us consider in what 
 sense the phenomenal elements constituting the presentation may 
 be said to be the same or similar in the mental state before atten- 
 tion is directed to the lights and in the state in which it is thus 
 directed. 
 
 V 
 
 In support of his position Stumpf refers to a paper by A. Marty 
 which contains a criticism of James. 58 The passage in James tQ 
 which Marty refers has the following citation from Stumpf: 
 "And when, after successfully analysing this total, we call it back 
 to memory, as it was in its unanalysed state, and compare it with 
 the elements we have found, the latter (as it seems to me) may 
 be recognized as real parts contained in the former, and the 
 former seen to be their sum. So, for example, when we clearly 
 perceive that the content of our sensation of oil of peppermint is 
 partly a sensation of taste and partly of temperature." 29 Com- 
 menting on this, James says: "I should prefer to say that we 
 perceive that objective fact, known to us as the peppermint 
 taste, to contain those other objective facts known as aromatic 
 or sapid quality, and coldness, respectively. No ground to sup- 
 pose that the vehicle of this last very complex perception has any 
 identity with the earlier psychosis — least of all contained in it." 
 Closer consideration of these two statements will bring us face 
 to face with the parting of the ways between so-called structural- 
 ism and functionalism, and will also make clear to us how diver- 
 gent are the two attempts to do justice to a completer 
 understanding of the activity side of consciousness that are 
 represented by such psychologists as Dewey and Angell on the 
 one hand, and by Stumpf on the other. It is hoped that this 
 consideration, together with its bearing upon a discussion of the 
 experimental investigations of the thought processes, which is to 
 
TION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY u 
 
 a sufficient justification for broaching in this 
 subject of the psychologist's fallacy and of the 
 en. 
 
 VI 
 
 iccording to Stumpf the immediately given is the 
 I Funktionen and the relations immanent in these, 
 ndividual is momentarily conscious", i.e., the 
 ediate. We have no reason to believe that a 
 the temper of James could not agree to this 
 ist in so far as the given is defined as that of 
 dual is momentarily conscious, or the psychically 
 difference therefore must lie in the use to which 
 ained in the form of the subject's judgments 
 mtent of his immediate experience are put and 
 ion that is placed upon them. James' contention 
 rmint experience is a totality and has nothing in 
 e experience in which consciousness analyses oil 
 nto a complex of stimuli mediating taste and 
 ations. That analysis has been made under con- 
 h attention is focussed on the content as 
 ad yields results in a rather elaborate judgment 
 ter of the "object" presented. (We can here 
 uestion of James' use of the term, "object" and 
 he two experiences are quite dissimilar and the 
 ;aid to be contained in the former. James here 
 ilytic experience as a whole — in the terms of 
 ily to the Erscheinungen which constitute the 
 >o to the Funktionen which may be directly 
 rig the immediate experience of peppermint- 
 dements. 
 
 ise by itself we may say that in the unanalysed 
 strikes as immediate matter-of-fact (was als 
 Ibar einleuchtet) is to be couched in terms of 
 
io CARL RAHN 
 
 case the content of his idea of one of the Funktionei 
 revert to this anon, but for the present let us consi 
 sense the phenomenal elements constituting the prese 
 be said to be the same or similar in the mental state 1 
 tion is directed to the lights and in the state in whi 
 directed. 
 
 In support of his position Stumpf refers to a paper 
 which contains a criticism of James. 58 The passage 
 which Marty refers has the following citation fr 
 "And when, after successfully analysing this total, \\ 
 to memory, as it was in its unanalysed state, and cor 
 the elements we have found, the latter (as it seems 
 be recognized as real parts contained in the forr 
 former seen to be their sum. So, for example, wh< 
 perceive that the content of our sensation of oil of ] 
 partly a sensation of taste and partly of temperatu 
 menting on this, James says: "I should prefer to 
 perceive that objective fact, known to us as th< 
 taste, to contain those other objective facts knowr 
 or sapid quality, and coldness, respectively. No gi 
 pose that the vehicle of this last very complex perce 
 identity with the earlier psychosis — least of all con 
 Closer consideration of these two statements will 1 
 to face with the parting of the ways between so-call 
 ism and functionalism, and will also make clear to 1 
 gent are the two attempts to do justice to 
 understanding of the activity side of consciousr 
 represented by such psychologists as Dewey and i 
 one hand, and by Stumpf on the other. It is he 
 consideration, together with its bearing upon a disc 
 experimental investigations of the thought processe 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY n 
 
 follow, will be a sufficient justification for broaching in this 
 connection the subject of the psychologist's fallacy and of the 
 immediately given. 
 
 VI 
 
 We saw that according to Stumpf the immediately given is the 
 "phenomena and Funktionen and the relations immanent in these, 
 of which an individual is momentarily conscious", i.e., the 
 psychically immediate. We have no reason to believe that a 
 psychologist of the temper of James could not agree to this 
 definition, at least in so far as the given is defined as that of 
 which the individual is momentarily conscious, or the psychically 
 immediate. The difference therefore must lie in the use to which 
 the data thus gained in the form of the subject's judgments 
 regarding the content of his immediate experience are put and 
 in the interpretation that is placed upon them. James' contention 
 is that the peppermint experience is a totality and has nothing in 
 common with the experience in which consciousness analyses oil 
 of peppermint into a complex of stimuli mediating taste and 
 temperature sensations. That analysis has been made under con- 
 ditions in which attention is focussed on the content as 
 Erscheinungen and yields results in a rather elaborate judgment 
 as to the character of the "object" presented. (We can here 
 leave aside the question of James' use of the term, "object" and 
 "objective".) The two experiences are quite dissimilar and the 
 latter cannot be said to be contained in the former. James here 
 refers to the analytic experience as a whole — in the terms of 
 Stumpf not merely to the Erscheinungen which constitute the 
 "object", but also to the Funktionen which may be directly 
 involved in giving the immediate experience of peppermint- 
 analysed-into-its-elements. 
 
 Taking each case by itself we may say that in the unanalysed 
 state that which strikes as immediate matter-of-fact (was als 
 Tatsache unmittelbar einleuchtet) is to be couched in terms of 
 
12 CARL RAHN 
 
 the judgment, that within the larger setting which it had with 
 reference to some activity, the part that was singled out and 
 noted was a unitary somewhat ; the peppermint, with a pleasurable 
 or painful feeling tone, mayhap also some somatic and visceral 
 sensations. This much is the immediately given — a description 
 of the immediate psychical content. It is that which the subject 
 reports. So much for the first phase of the experience, in which 
 the object is "given" as a whole, unanalysed. Then follows the 
 analytic phase, or the one in which the object is apprehended at 
 the focus of attention. The individual now reports that he can 
 discriminate two sorts of sensations: taste and temperature. 
 This statement, plus anything he may have to say concerning his 
 awareness of concomitant process, whether sensations connected 
 with the accommodation of the sense organ, or Funktionen if he 
 employs that category, or other phenomena at the fringe, — these 
 will constitute the psychological data of the immediately given of 
 the second experience. We do not pretend that this is an exhaus- 
 tive statement of all that a careful observer might report as the 
 immediately given in the two experiences. But it is by means of 
 such judgments only that the psychologist can in any sense be 
 said to get at the content that is immediately given in any con- 
 sciousness other than his own. It is only in this way that the 
 immediately given in the character of "mind-stuff" can be made 
 the starting point for a body of psychological knowledge dealing 
 with human consciousness. 68 We now ask: What may the 
 investigator do with the data thus gained? Stumpf claims that 
 he is entitled to read back into the first experience the "content" 
 of the second experience. There is nothing, to be sure, that 
 would militate against his right to do this if he so desires. And 
 if by doing so he obtains a system of knowledge that serves his 
 purposes and that may serve the purposes of others, he is thereby 
 justified by his procedure, so long as in doing so he is not intro- 
 ducing an element of immanent inconsistency into his system. 
 
 Yet we believe that this latter thing does happen. In what 
 sense can that part of conscious content abstracted from the 
 second experience be said to be "recognized as real parts con- 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 13 
 
 tained in the former"? The abstracted "elements" are immedi- 
 ately given as part of another, the second experience, and that 
 section of the content of the second experience therefore cannot 
 be said to be identical with the content of the first experience or 
 any part thereof. If not that, have we any immediate evidence 
 that they are identically similar? If we take immediate evidence 
 to mean the record of immediate judgments in the sense defined 
 above, then this question, too, must receive a negative reply. 
 Even Stumpf can do no more than tell us that "we will have to 
 say to ourselves that just a moment ago", while we were lost in 
 thought in coming down the lighted thoroughfare, "there also 
 were lights and auditory impressions of the same kind, and in 
 the same spatial or temporal relations, incidentally also of the 
 same intensity as those of which we are now aware". This 
 statement, however, is not of the nature of an immediate judg- 
 ment passed upon the immediately given content of the first 
 experience, for such could only have been obtained by stopping 
 our man lost in reverie and requiring him then and there to tell 
 us concerning the character of sensory content as it was margin- 
 ally present in consciousness. Stumpf himself tries to subsume 
 his judgment just quoted under the head of direct comparison, 
 for he is apparently aware that a doctrine so important for his 
 theory as this is, ought to rest on some kind of evidence. We do 
 not here cavil at his argument that the term "direct comparison" 
 ought not to be restricted to those cases in which the two contents 
 to be compared are simultaneously present to consciousness during 
 the act of comparison, but that it should be made to include also 
 those cases of comparison of a present content with another that 
 is just passing, or of one just passing with one that preceded it 
 but is still lingering in consciousness. 61 We would, however, 
 suggest that the conditions under which this method of direct 
 comparison is to be employed, be more rigidly defined, in order 
 that we may have a criterion for the validity of the evidence 
 which is yielded by this method. The evidence derived from the 
 illustration cited in Professor Stumpf 's treatise does not appear to 
 be altogether unambiguous. Reverting to the case of the lights 
 
14 CARL RAHN 
 
 and the strokes of the bell tolling the hour while we are coming 
 from the theatre, lost in thought, we are told that we can escape 
 the interpretation that the two contents are alike only by making 
 special artificial assumptions, e.g. : that in the reproduction of the 
 content just past for purposes of comparison with the present 
 content, there is in the process of reproduction a change or an 
 assimilation to the standard of the present content. 60 Why such 
 an objection should appear particularly far-fetched and "artificial' ' 
 is not immediately patent to us. That such an assimilation of 
 past experience to the standard of present experience frequently 
 does occur, no one will doubt. We know that the lights of our 
 city streets possess fairly uniform candle power, that the tolling 
 of the bell in the steeple, too, is fairly constant in timbre and rate 
 of stroke, — what then would be more natural at first blush than 
 to infer that the experience of just a moment ago must have been 
 practically (there is much virtue in this expression of our every- 
 day life) the same as it is now that we are attending to the 
 objects directly. (At this point Titchener might well warn us 
 against what he has called the "stimulus error.") And even when 
 the judgment is not based on mediate experience as just described, 
 but an attempt is made to base it directly on a comparison of the 
 two contents by the method discussed above, it would be pre- 
 ferable to have the two experiences called out under somewhat 
 different conditions than is the case in the illustration, i.e., we 
 would ask for experimental conditions that would minimize the 
 suggestive influence of the content given in the state of focalized 
 attention. 
 
 A thorough-going experimental psychology would demand that 
 every aspect of the sensory experience be compared in the two 
 cases. What is the difference of the content mediated by the same 
 objective stimulus under conditions of focal and of marginal 
 apprehension? How do the sensations compare with reference to 
 their various attributes? Do they differ at all in quality, or in 
 duration, or in extensity, or in intensity? And then the further 
 question arises whether these are the only respects in which the 
 sensations may differ. Only after all of these are answered are 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 15 
 
 we entitled to conclude that on the basis of immediate intro- 
 spective evidence the two contents must be regarded as being 
 identically similar. Lacking experimental evidence on some of 
 these points, we turn to everyday introspection and to the difficul- 
 ties which this question has caused in some of the theoretical 
 discussions, for a formulation of the problem. Here we note that 
 certain doctrines have become so thoroughly incorporated into 
 the psychological point of view, that they inhibit effectually the 
 rise of some of the questions indicated above. The doctrine of 
 specific energy apparently precludes debate as to the question of 
 the sameness of quality, so long as the objective stimuli and the 
 nerves stimulated remain the same. Duration, too, so far as 
 the immediate sensation is concerned, as over against its 
 influence upon future psychic experience, would be regarded as 
 the function of the same factor in both cas?°, i.e., of the applica- 
 tion of the stimulus subject to the conditions of psychological 
 fatigue. We would question, however, whether the immediately 
 given duration for consciousness would necessarily be the same. 
 Without raising the issue of a possible difference in behavior of 
 intrinsically pleasurable and intrinsically painful sensory processes 
 as regards subjective duration under the two conditions, of being 
 attended to on the one hand, and not being attended to on the 
 other,. — we would ask whether the attention reaction does not 
 often contain within itself the conditions for prolonging the 
 objectively measured time of what subjectively is experienced as 
 a uniformly continuous sensory process? This problem is per- 
 haps most fascinating in the field of cutaneous and auditory 
 sensation. In the case of the bell tolling the hour, there is a 
 possibility for the last chime to linger on in consciousness in a 
 way it does not do under conditions of inattention. Under such 
 circumstances the ear wooes the sound, reaches after it, as it 
 were, as it retreats and gradually envelopes itself in nothingness. 
 When we turn to the attribute of extensity, orthodoxy again 
 inhibits any tendency to dissent from the statement that the two 
 states exhibit no difference of sensory content in this respect. 
 The moment, however, that we come to the question of intensity, 
 
16 CARL RAHN 
 
 we note a more pronounced lack of unanimity. At this point we 
 can find some experimental material that is more or less germane. 
 If we take the term broadly enough, most of these experimental 
 attempts may be subsumed under the head of distraction tests. 
 Most of this work is mentioned by Titchener in his "Lectures on 
 the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention", and its 
 trend is in general to show that within a certain range at least 
 attention does tend to increase the intensity of the sensory con- 
 tent. 91 Stumpf himself admits this much in a later monograph, 
 Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften, where he says: "It does 
 happen, of course, that at times the Funktionen retroactively 
 bring about a change in the Erscheinungen, as when in the case 
 of concentrated attention the intensity of a very weak sensory or 
 image content is raised to a certain degree." 69 This would in a 
 certain sense be equivalent to admitting the validity of our 
 objection, if it were not for his immediate qualification following 
 the statement just quoted : "But in general such retroaction does 
 not occur, and when it does occur, it is always within the limits of 
 the possibilities prescribed by the nature of the Erscheinungen/' 
 We find, then, that there is some question whether we are justi- 
 fied in asserting unqualifiedly that the sensory "content" of the 
 two types of experience mentioned by James and Stumpf, is 
 identically similar as regards the usually recognized "attributes." 
 
 VII 
 
 Having touched upon the question with reference to the 
 usually recognized attributes of sensation, we may go on to ask 
 whether these are the only directions in which the sensory 
 content might possibly differ in the two states. Here we come 
 upon one of the most vexing of the moot questions of psychology, 
 the question of clearness or vividness as an attribute of sensation. 
 All writers appear to agree that if there is an independently dis- 
 tinguishable aspect of conscious experience that is to be designated 
 by that name, it is to be noted in connection with that phase of 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 17 
 
 consciousness which is known as attention. Stumpf, we saw, 
 makes clearness an attribute, not of the sensory content, but of 
 the Funk Hon of awareness. The amount of consciousness that is 
 involved in my being aware of the bonfire outside, may vary 
 from almost none, when I am only marginally aware of it, to 
 almost all, as when I sit fascinated, as it were, by the leaping 
 tongues of flame and the mystic clouds of smoke. The difference 
 in the two cases, we have already seen, at too great length, 
 perhaps, lies for Stumpf not in the sensory content, but in the 
 mental activity that is operating upon that content, an activity 
 of which we may be distinctly aware and the attribute of which 
 is just this degree of clearness. When we turn, however, to the 
 pages of a psychologist such as Titchener, we read the following : 
 "Whatever attention is, it must be described in terms of mental 
 processes, sensations and images and affections, and ex- 
 plained by reference to its physiological conditions." 77 Titchener, 
 therefore, proceeds to make clearness an attribute not of a mental 
 activity, but of one of the elements, viz., sensation. "Clearness 
 is the attribute which gives a sensation its particular place in 
 consciousness: the clearer sensation is dominant, independent, 
 outstanding, the less clear sensation is subordinate, undistin- 
 guished in the background of consciousness." 76 A sensation is 
 clear when it "is at its best, when it is making the most of itself 
 in experience. Clearness is an intensive attribute, in the sense 
 that it shows degrees of more or less : but it is altogether different 
 from intensity proper." 78 It is important for us to note only that 
 for Titchener clearness is regarded as an attribute of sensation 
 and that it is "altogether different from intensity proper". In 
 trying to make clear this distinction he introduces a quotation 
 from Wundt. He writes : "In the first place, there can be no doubt 
 of the independent status of clearness as sensation attribute. As 
 Wundt says : 'Klarheit und Starke der Eindriicke sind durchaus 
 von einander verschieden' ; *das Klarer- und das Starker-werden 
 eines Eindruckes sind . . . subjectiv wohl zu unterscheidende 
 Vorgange'." 90 The citation from Wundt is correct; not so, 
 however, the interpretation that Titchener puts upon it. For 
 
18 CARL RAHN 
 
 when we read the context in Wundt, we come upon the following : 
 "Da die Starke der Empfindungselemente einer Vorstellung auf 
 die Klarheit einen zweifellosen Einfluss ausiibt, so sind nicht 
 selten beide Begriffe mit einander vermengt oder sogar fur ident- 
 isch gehalten worden. Streng genommen kann aber immer nur 
 von der Starke der Empfindungselemente, nicht von der Starke 
 einer Vorstellung die Rede sein, da in diese meist Empfindungs- 
 inhalte von sehr verschiedener Starke eingehen. Umgekehrt 
 dagegen sind Klarheit unde Deutlichkeit ausschliesslch Eigen- 
 schaften der Vorstellungen, die auf Empfindungen nur iibertragen 
 werden konnen, wenn diese als Vorstellungsbestandteile gedacht 
 werden." 109 In other words, Wundt does not make clearness 
 peculiarly an attribute of the sensation or image element, but an 
 attribute of the complex percept or Vorstellung. Wundt is quite 
 explicit on this point, and in the very context from which 
 Titchener takes the quotation, Wundt repudiates the interpreta- 
 tion that is put upon it. But the essential thing for us is that 
 Wundt does note the fact of clearness and that he makes it an 
 attribute of content. 
 
 Here we have examples of three different points of view re- 
 garding the fact of clearness as a factor of conscious experience. 
 All three agree that introspection reveals the fact of degrees of 
 clearness as an attribute of some phase of consciousness, and that 
 the higher and highest degrees of clearness accrue to states of 
 consciousness under conditions that are technically called "focal- 
 ized attention". But they differ as to the phases of conscious 
 experience of which clearness is to be regarded the attribute. 
 Titchener makes clearness one of the attributes in terms of which 
 sensation and image elements are to be described. Stump f makes 
 it the attribute of one of his psychic Fnnktioncn. the attribute by 
 which the Funktion of awareness is presumably revealed to us as 
 "immediately given". Then we come to Wundt. Like Stumpf, 
 he too believes that we may become directly aware of psychic 
 activities : "Alongside of the going and coming of percepts and 
 ideas ( Vorstellungen) we are now and then more or less distinctly 
 aware of an inner activity that we call attention." 108 Yet unlike 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 19 
 
 Stumpf, Wundt would still reduce this consciousness of psychic 
 activity to elements of sensation and affection. But clearness is 
 not an attribute of this complex of elements that taken together 
 go to constitute our consciousness of activity; nor is clearness 
 for him an attribute of the sensation and image element as it is 
 for Titchener; it is rather one of those "new attributes, peculiar 
 to the compounds themselves", that "always arise as a result of 
 the combination of these elements". 106 "Since clearness, obscur- 
 ity, etc., . . . always arise from the interconnection of psychical 
 compounds, they cannot be regarded as the determinants of 
 psychical elements." We have therefore before us a case of 
 agreement as to the "immediate givenness" of the aspect of 
 clearness in conscious experience, but disagreement as to the 
 particular phase of conscious experience of which it is to be 
 regarded the attribute or determinant. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Is there any way in which we can gain vantage ground whence 
 we may see how these differences arise in the three psychological 
 systems ? One way, it would seem, may prove fruitful. That is, 
 attempting to attain to an appreciation of the immanent rela- 
 tionship of the psychological categories within the various 
 systems. That will obviate an exposition anew of the ramifica- 
 tions of the problem of mental analysis as a scientific method. 
 We will examine instead the precipitants of what various 
 writers regard as legitimate application of this method. Let us 
 consider first various implications involved in Titchener's exposi- 
 tion. For him the "given" is the concrete experience, e.g., the 
 square and the melody. "Our psychological task is to analyse 
 these given perceptions, to discover their elements, and to formu- 
 late the laws under which elementary processes combine. That 
 done, we can write for 'square' and 'melody', 'these and these 
 elements connected in these and these uniform ways', and we can 
 go on to search for physiological conditions. We have solved our 
 
20 CARL RAHN 
 
 problem in analytical terms; we have not first defined the terms, 
 and then put them together to produce something that was not 
 contained in the definition. ,,8ia Titchener is also fully aware 
 of the relation of his sensation elements to the percept: "The 
 elements are . . . the result of analysis; the perceptions are the 
 original things, and the sensations are found in them by observa- 
 tion; perceptions are given us, and we discover that they are 
 analysable. Misunderstanding here is fatal to the student of 
 psychology, for it means misapprehension of the central psycho- 
 logical problem." 79 The mental elements, processes "that can- 
 not be further analysed by introspection", of which sensations 
 constitute a class, "are simple ... in the sense that they are 
 mental experience reduced to its lowest terms; but they are still 
 real processes, still actual items of mental experience. Hence, 
 like the chemical elements, they show various aspects or attributes, 
 — present different sides, so to speak, — each of which may be 
 examined separately by the psychologist. It is by reference to 
 these attributes that introspection is able to classify them under 
 different headings". 75 The mental element must be defined by 
 "an enumeration of its attributes". 97 Titchener is furthermore at 
 pains to have us know that the elements of sensation, feeling, 
 and image, are not to be conceived of as static things, but as pro- 
 cesses. 71 They melt and fuse and flow into one another as they 
 occur in the stream that we call our consciousness. Yet with all 
 this insistence on the process character of consciousness, Titchener 
 nevertheless reverts ever and anon to the use of analogies taken 
 from physical science which are not always the happiest, if his 
 intention is to emphasize unambiguously this process-character.* 
 Whatever content the chemist may put into his concept of chem- 
 ical element, one thing there is that is not a part of its meaning, 
 it does not signfy a process. The concept of "process" implies a 
 correlative one of a structural system of parts or elements which 
 act and react upon one another. It is this interaction within a 
 
 * Cf. Titchener, A Textbook of Psychology, 46: "They (the elementary 
 mental processes) must remain unchanged, however persistent oar attempt 
 at analysis." See also above § 11. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 21 
 
 structural system that constitutes a process. In the mind of the 
 chemist the elements are abstractions, to be sure, but the essential 
 Merkmal of this abstract concept is that of a relatively fixed form 
 of matter that behaves thus when it is brought into interaction 
 with certain other elements, and thus and so when it comes into 
 interplay with still other forms or combinations, under these and 
 these conditions. And it is this interaction between the various 
 elementary forms of matter that constitutes a chemical process. 
 But for the chemist the abstract element which he chases through 
 these various processes remains a relatively fixed substrate, a 
 "form of matter". Now it may come to pass, however, that a 
 physicist comes along and takes one of the simple substances of 
 the chemist into his own laboratory, and now, for the purposes 
 of the physicist, it may become within itself, without reference 
 to other substances even, a highly complex affair. It may become 
 a closed system of forces or of atoms or what not, which act and 
 react upon one another in certain definite ways. In other words, 
 there are processes going on within, and the physicist by his 
 analysis has gone beyond the analysis of the chemist. What is 
 more, this anaylsis is not altogether merely a matter of theory, 
 but is paralleled by some empirical evidence. For the chemist, 
 however, such an analysis is irrelevant; for him the element re- 
 mains an ultimate somewhat, which by interaction with others, 
 gives rise to various chemical activities or processes, in the course 
 of which the element may discover various attributes or proper- 
 ties that are brought out by varying the conditions under which 
 it is brought into interaction with the other elements. It is 
 considerations such as these that lead us to believe that the analogy 
 of the chemical element is an unfortunate one if our meaning is 
 that the simplest analysable content of consciousness is essentially 
 a changing, fluid somewhat. Change and flux are the result of 
 interaction of the elements, under varying conditions of heat, of 
 pressure, etc., but these processes are not themselves the elements. 
 To refer to a phenomenon now as an element and now as a 
 process implies a shifting in purpose and in point of view, as in 
 the case of the chemist and the physicist cited above. If the 
 
22 CARL RAHN 
 
 element is to be considered as a part, an irreducible, ultimate 
 content of consciousness, then it cannot at the same time be 
 regarded as a process, for a process implies the interrelation of a 
 number of elements or factors. The concept of element is, or 
 formerly was, a structural category, whereas that of process is a 
 functional one. 
 
 IX 
 
 But to leave the question of nomenclature — for we are here 
 interested chiefly in the manner in which the attributive aspects 
 of experience have been singled out and in the method by which 
 they are "attributed" to the various categories, i.e., how do the 
 "attributes" come to constitute the element? — We next note that 
 affections, ideas and sensations are the "results of analysis". 81 
 They are the simplest, rock-bottom forms of "real", "actual" 
 experience that analysis will divulge. As real components of 
 consciousness they reveal to us certain aspects or attributes, just 
 as do the chemical elements. 75 It is in terms of these attributes 
 that a sensation is to be defined, says Titchener, and the sensa- 
 tion is not something over and above the sum of these attributes. 
 His position is further similar to that of Kiilpe, who says at the 
 time of writing his text : "These attributes are characterized 
 (i) by their inseparability from the sensation ... (2) Further, 
 the nullification of any of the attributes involves the disappearance 
 or cessation of the sensation." 32 We may now ask : What is the 
 method by which these attributes of the element are determined ? 
 Titchener tells us that the element is not further analysable 
 by introspection. On the other hand we are told that the element 
 presents different aspects or sides, called attributes, that can be 
 separately attended to. Thus attended to they are discriminated, 
 and what is this other than further analysis ? Is it other in kind 
 than that which yielded the elements? And are the precipitants 
 of this further analysis of another sort? 
 
 This question has been touched upon, among others, by Tal- 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 23 
 
 bot, 70 Washburn 98 and Calkins. 23 Talbot, writing on "The 
 Doctrine of Conscious Elements", points out that "the modern 
 theory lays particular stress upon the fact that the psycho- 
 logical element is an elementary process", and that the "criter- 
 ion of a psychological element is irreducibility". And yet, coming 
 to discuss the attributes Talbot says that "it is a fact that the 
 work of analysis does not actually cease when they (the irreducible 
 ultimates) are discovered . . . there is need for a second process 
 for the purpose of determining the properties of our elements 
 ... In the first analysis we passed successively from one process 
 to another, finding in each new stage the explanation of the more 
 complex one which preceded it. When we have at length reached 
 a process which we cannot explain by means of another process, 
 our regress is finished, our element is discovered. Whatever 
 analysis may now be possible, will be entirely distinct from the 
 first, and will in no way affect its claim to be complete. The 
 attempt to find an explanation for our process in something else 
 than process, the effort to go behind our ultimate in order to 
 explain it, would but repeat the fundamental error of the doctrine 
 of the faculties." Yet the writer has failed to show why the 
 precipitant of the last analysis, the "attribute", is not entitled 
 to be called a process just as much as are the percept and the 
 sensation, which, we take it, constitute the earlier precipitants in 
 the "regress". It is simply asserted that the second analysis is 
 entirely distinct from the first one, i.e., from the analysis by which 
 the sensation is abstracted from the percept, and presumably also 
 from that by which the percept has been abstracted from the total 
 experience of the moment. (This would seem to be implied by 
 the use of the term "regress".) An immanent criticism of the 
 position just noted is impossible, however, for nowhere in the 
 paper is there a direct definition of the conceptions of "analysis" 
 and "process". We take the word "distinct" in the sense of 
 separate process of analysis, rather than in the sense of a different 
 kind of analytic process, for the writer says, "In the first analysis 
 we passed successively from one process to another, finding in 
 each stage the explanation of the more complex one that pre- 
 
24 CARL RAHN 
 
 ceded it." From this it appears that the writer would not hold 
 that the three analytic processes that we mentioned represented 
 different methods of analysis. The distinction, therefore, must 
 lie in the precipitants, that is. in the percept, the sensation, and 
 the attribute. The percept is a complex process. The sensation 
 is a simple process. It is an "ultimate". The attributes are not 
 processes, they are merely "attributes of our elements". In call- 
 ing the element a process, Talbot believes that its "functional 
 nature" is being emphasized. From this it would appear that 
 "functioning" is conceived of as being the essential Merkmal of 
 "process" as a psychological category. Now it may well be that 
 what analysis brings to light when it discovers what Talbot and 
 Titchener designate as an attribute, may be the functionally deter- 
 mining factor in many of our conscious reactions : e.g., intensity 
 of a tone rather than any other of its "attributes". Intensity 
 functions frequently, just as does quality, or a complex stimulus 
 pattern, in evoking its own peculiar specific reactions, and if this 
 be admitted to be tantamount to ascribing to it a "functional 
 nature", then the intensity, as an "attribute", has the same claim 
 as the sensation, as an "element", to be designated a "process". 
 If, therefore, intensity be conceded to possess functional value in 
 its own right in determining some of our conscious reactions, Tal- 
 bot cannot on that score deny it the right to be called an ele- 
 mentary process. Also, it appears to satisfy the criterion of 
 irreducibility. The only question that could arise is this : Has it 
 been abstracted from the complex mental state by a legitimate 
 process of psychological abstraction? 
 
 Calkins, in a paper on the "Attributes of Sensation", com- 
 menting on the position of Talbot, says : "either the sensation has 
 attributes, but then it is complex, no element and has lost its 
 excuse for psychological being ; or the sensation is an irreducible 
 and unanalysable element, but then its simplicity is absolute, not 
 to be trifled with, and not to be explained away by reference to 
 any second process of analysis into elements, which yet are not 
 elements, but only 'attributes', 'aspects' or something equally 
 vague and meaningless." Consequently Calkins avers that inten- 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 25 
 
 sities and qualities "take their places among the distinguishable 
 elements of consciousness", for "if abstract irreducibleness and 
 distinctness be seriously maintained as the sole criteria of the 
 psychic element, analytic psychology has no place and no use for 
 the 'attribute' of sensation". In other words, Calkins affirms that 
 on the criterion of unanalysability it is the "attribute" that should 
 be regarded as the element in consciousness. We have, therefore, 
 two different conclusions as to the psychic ultimates based on the 
 criterion of irreducibility. 
 
 Washburn, in a paper on psychological analysis, points out that 
 such differences are very likely to arise so long as our conception 
 of analysis is not carefully defined. Of purely "psychological" 
 methods she distinguishes two: "(1) the psychological method of 
 calling mental phenomena elementary because they are the sim- 
 plest phenomena that, being independently variable, may be at- 
 tended to separately; (2) the psychological method of calling 
 them elementary because they are the simplest phenomena, that, 
 as capable of being experienced apart from each other, may be 
 attended to separately." Calkins' element is a result of the first 
 method; Titchener's is a result of the second. 
 
 Such being the method by which the sensation is obtained as a 
 psychical element, we find that Kiilpe's statement, quoted above 
 concerning the nature of the attributes and their interrelations, is 
 quite in accord with Washburn's analysis. And we find that 
 Titchener's statement accords with that of Kulpe. For Titchener, 
 then, the sensation element is the sum of all its attributes, and 
 not a something over and above these. "The annihilation of any 
 attribute carries with it the annihilation, the disappearance, of the 
 sensation itself." 82 It is the being given together, therefore, of 
 the attributes that constitutes a sensation a "real process", an 
 "actual item of experience". "If a sensation is to exist, it must 
 come into being with all its attributes." 83 Since an attribute 
 
26 CARL RAHN 
 
 cannot exist in consciousness without the others, it cannot lay 
 claim to being an independent element of experience ; since when 
 one is present, the others, too, will be discovered, and since they 
 somehow constitute a unitary item of experience, the complex 
 is designated as the element. Yet the question may arise whether 
 their unification or incorporation into a single item of experience 
 is a function of their peculiar psychic character, or whether it is 
 not rather a function of the habit of objective reference. If the 
 former is to be the case, then in every fusion of sensations of 
 different departments of sense, introspection would always unam- 
 biguously connect up the intensity component of the experience 
 with its proper quality ; yet it is still a moot question whether this 
 is always the case. If, on the other hand, the uniqueness and 
 irreducibility of the sensation element is a function of the habit 
 of objective reference to a stimulus acting upon a particular 
 sense-organ, then too it cannot be regarded otherwise than as a 
 derived, rather than an inherent, characteristic of the element. 
 For the present, therefore, we can mean by the term "insepara- 
 bility of the attributes" nothing more than a condition for their 
 entrance into, and exit from, consciousness ; but nothing for cer- 
 tain concerning their behavior while they are in consciousness. 
 It still remains a task for experimental psychology to determine 
 whether or not the incorporation of the "attributes" into a unique 
 item of experience, a particular sensation, is an 'irreducible' fact 
 of consciousness. 
 
 It may not be amiss to discuss at this point the relative impor- 
 tance of the various attributes, which would lead up to a consider- 
 ation of the relation of the attributes inter se. If we turn to some 
 of the textbooks of psychology we very often run across a state- 
 ment to the effect that of all the various attributes that the differ- 
 ent writers ascribe to the sensation element, quality is somehow 
 the most important of the lot. It is the "body" of the sensa- 
 tion, so to speak, and so soon as we have passed the introductory 
 pages of preliminary definition, we find many of the writers 
 falling into the way of speaking as if the quality were the sensa- 
 tion. Thus Kulpe : "Im algemeinen lassen sich alle diese Eigen- 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 27 
 
 schaften variieren, und es beruht darauf die Moglichkeit ihre 
 Gesetze im Einzelnen festzustellen. Nur spielt auch in dieser 
 Beziehung die Qualitat eine eigenthumlich Rolle. Eine Aender- 
 ung der Qualitat ist mit einem Uebergang zu anderen 
 Empfindungen identisch, wahrend eine blosse Aenderung der 
 iibrigen Eigenschaften bei gleichbleibender Qualitat scheinbar 
 dieselbe Empfindung fortbestehen lasst. Auch hierin zeigt sich 
 dass die Qualitat mit dem Wesen der Empfindung auf das 
 Engste verwachsen ist. Sie representirt gewissermassen gegen- 
 iiber den anderen wechselnden Eigenschaften den festen Kern 
 der Empfindung." 33 It looms large in its importance for experi- 
 ence, and is singled out and attended to while the other attributes, 
 like mute Cinderellas, perform their humbler functions unobtru- 
 sively in the background. Yet here again, it is a question whether 
 this advantage possessed by the attribute of quality must be 
 accepted as an ultimate fact testifying to a unique position of 
 quality as over against the other attributes, specifically as over 
 against intensity. It may well be that the usual function of 
 sensory consciousness in human experience is the discrimination 
 of qualitative differences. For cognitive reactions, for building 
 up knowledge, apprehension of quality may be basic, and atten- 
 tion focuses upon it. Yet there may be other reactions in which 
 it is not the quality but the attribute of intensity that takes first 
 place on the stage. This may be the case in emotional reactions 
 of the more primitive sort, where the intensity of stimulation 
 becomes the functionally important factor, not the quality. For 
 aesthetic reactions degree of intensity often becomes as impor- 
 tant and often more important than sensory quality. There 
 are individuals for whom a bit of music is carried almost entirely 
 in terms of intensity changes plus rhythm. Primitive music, 
 characterized as it is by a poverty of tonal variation and making 
 up for this monotony by accent and rhythm, may present favora- 
 ble material for a study of this question. Of two tones struck 
 in rapid succession, the one softly, the other accented, the hearer 
 is immediately aware very often of differences in intensities, but 
 is in a quandary as to the relative position of the two experiences 
 
28 CARL RAHN 
 
 in the tonal scale. It may well be that for his "immediate experi- 
 ence" the elements that came to consciousness may have had the 
 marks of being auditory rather than visual experiences, but they 
 may have been quite innocent of any specific quality mark; if 
 quale there was, it did not possess the same degree of clearness as 
 did the intensity character. Apply an icy cold point never so 
 lightly to the skin, and remove it quickly; the subject reports 
 intensity of sensation, but often is in doubt as to the quale. We 
 may therefore ask whether the tendency to regard the quality as 
 the "body" of the sensory experience, as over against other at- 
 tributes, especially as over against intensity, is not a function, in 
 part at least, of the habit of attending to the quality of the sensory 
 content, rather than to its other "aspects". If this should prove 
 to be the case, quality would be robbed of its unique position 
 among the attributes. 
 
 Concerning the relation of the various attributes that are 
 usually named as the inseparable constituents of a sensation 
 element, we have thus far come to note the following considera- 
 tions: We ought to observe some caution lest we put into the 
 conception of "inseparability of the attributes" a meaning that is 
 not yet warranted by experimental evidence. To affirm the 
 inseparability of the attributes means only that they come into and 
 go out of consciousness together. It does not necessarily mean 
 that while they are in consciousness they are held together in a 
 unity by some tie inherent in their peculiar psychological consti- 
 tution, for it may well be that the readiness with which we 
 attribute the "attributes" to one and the same "sensation", may 
 be due to the operation of factors extrinsic to the particular 
 "sensation". . . . We noted further that there is a tendency 
 to regard quality as the more basic of the attributes, and the 
 question presented itself whether this had to be accepted as an 
 ultimate fact, or whether there are not conditions under which 
 degree of intensity may come to assume the "body" role. If any 
 introspective evidence should be brought to light that would show 
 that this may at times be the case, then quality would be robbed 
 of its seemingly unique position among the attributes. That 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 29 
 
 intensity may become the functionally important factor cannot be 
 doubted on introspective grounds; that in some of the lower 
 forms it is functionally the important factor, as quality for the 
 most part is with us, seems highly probable ; it therefore remains 
 as yet an open question whether we ought unreservedly and 
 without qualification ascribe to quale the unique position of being 
 the fundamental attribute, the "body" of the sensory experience. 
 . . . And we saw in the third place that while there appears to 
 be a close connection between the various attributes so far as 
 their entrance into, and exit from, consciousness is concerned, 
 it was nevertheless possible in the case of intensity and quality 
 that they might differ widely with respect to their attentional 
 clearness. This is in a certain sense a restatement of the point 
 just made, viz. : that the various attributes might differ from time 
 to time in their functional value. Nevertheless the restatement in 
 terms of attentional clearness might prove to possess some signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 XI 
 
 It is this last point that is of paramount interest for us: the 
 status of clearness as an attribute of sensation, such as Titchener 
 makes it, as over against Stumpf , who makes it an attribute of 
 another psychological category: the Funktion. If it be true that 
 under certain conditions attention may focus upon some one of 
 the attributes of a sensation to the neglect of the others, so that 
 it thereby attains to a greater degree of attentional clearness than 
 do the others, then we would have an anomalous case of one 
 and the same sensation characterized by two "clearnesses", and 
 these not attributable to the sensation as a whole, but to various 
 ones of its attributes. How this situation can be escaped is hard 
 to see, for we certainly do have conscious experiences in the 
 course of the serious business of life, in which certain ones of 
 the aspects of sensory experience must be abstracted from, and 
 attention given only to one, say quality or intensity. Or would 
 
30 CARL RAHN 
 
 one claim that the process of attention in this case functions quite 
 differently than in the case where we are attentive to other 
 objects of normal experience? In a case of sudden need of a 
 tool, say for prying open, we cast about and grasp the first article 
 that appears to answer our purposes. The conventional use of 
 the implement may be quite other than the service into which we 
 are now impressing it, but in the present situation attention 
 abstracts from all uses but its adequacy in the immediate situa- 
 tion. It is this aspect that is in the foreground of consciousness, 
 and the meaning aspect of the implement in its normal function, 
 if present at all, is certainly not so clear. Is the case essentially 
 different when we come to the aspects of experience as sensory? 
 We see that we are here in the midst -of the same difficulty that 
 we met before in the discussion of analysis. Indeed, it is nothing 
 less than the very heart of that problem. Introspection, we are 
 told, is the process of attending to the flow of conscious processes 
 as conscious processes, with a view to noting parts and relation- 
 ships between parts. A part is noted in that it stands out more 
 clearly from the rest of consciousness, i.e., the part possesses 
 greater attentional clearness. This part is then further scrutinized 
 and it in turn divulges some simpler form of content. Finally we 
 arrive at an element, say a sensation. We saw that while the 
 psychologist starts out by saying that the sensation is the sum 
 of all its attributes, he practically makes one of them, quality, 
 the essence of the sensation, so that the other "aspects" become 
 attributes of this one. We saw that under ordinary conditions 
 quality is the aspect of sensory experience that is functionally 
 most significant, and that we have therefore come to give it 
 first place among the various aspects of sensation. In other 
 words, quality is attended to and hence whatever attentional 
 clearness may accrue to sensory experience under ordinary 
 conditions, is in reality a clearness of quality. Whatever other 
 aspects the sensation may present, they are in the background of 
 consciousness. Let us examine for a moment the real import of 
 one of the "conditions'' of clearness. The most obvious of these 
 conditions, says Titchener, is the intensity of the stimulus. 89 If 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 31 
 
 we introspect any of these cases in which an intense stimulus 
 commands our attention, we find that the most pronounced 
 character of the sensory content as it is precipitated into con- 
 sciousness, is just its intensiveness. We are aware first of all 
 that an intense stimulus has been presented and only after the 
 first shock is over and the reflex adjustment of the sense-organ is 
 complete, do we attend more specifically to the quality for pur- 
 poses of further adjustment to the situation. We believe that 
 it is only by a playing with terminology that one can escape the 
 statement of the fact that the shift that takes place in the divert- 
 ing of attention from intensity to quality is nothing other than a 
 shift in relative clearnes. Titchener writes as follows: "When 
 we are thus attending to extension or duration we may have very 
 hazy ideas indeed about intensity and quality; precisely as, when 
 we are observing intensity, we may have very hazy ideas about 
 quality and duration/' 84 There would therefore appear to be 
 discernible differences of clearness in the various aspects or 
 "attributes" of one and the same sensory experience, so that the 
 status of clearness as an attribute of sensation is anomalous in 
 this respect, for the doctrine of mental elements could not be 
 reconciled with a visual sensation that was characterized at one 
 and the same time by two hues, or two tints, or two intensities. 
 
 XII 
 
 But if it be true that within that sum total of attributes that, 
 we are told, constitute the sensation, there may exist different 
 degrees of clearness as regards the value of the various attributes 
 for the attention process, — if this be true, still another difficulty 
 would have to be faced in regard to the status of clearness as an 
 attribute of sensation. The difficulty in question relates to the 
 method of introspection. How do we ascertain the fact of 
 clearness of sensory content? It was averred a while ago that 
 we might attend to some one of the attributes of sensory experi- 
 ence whilst the other aspects receded into the background of the 
 
32 CARL RAHN 
 
 field. Is this true also in the case of the attribute of clearness? 
 Can we, for instance, become clearly aware that a given sensory 
 content possesses a low degree of clearness? And if so, is the 
 process by which we thus become aware of the attribute of 
 clearness in any sense similar to that by which the other attributes 
 of a sensory experience come into the foreground of conscious- 
 ness? We would not raise a host of metaphysical queries in an 
 attempt to give historical dignity and a backing of legitimacy to 
 our question : we will therefore consider it on purely psychological 
 grounds. The method of psychology, as of physcal science, says 
 Titchener, is observation. Yet to distinguish it from the latter, 
 we call it introspection, whereas the observation of physical 
 phenomena is better referred to as inspection. Still there is an 
 essential likeness between the two methods. In matching color 
 on the color-wheel, in determining the number of tones in a chord 
 that is being struck, there is practically no difference between 
 introspection and inspection. "You are using the same method 
 that you would use in counting the swings of a pendulum, or 
 taking readings from a galvanometer scale, in the physical labora- 
 tory. There is a difference in subject-matter : the colors and the 
 tones are dependent, not independent experiences : but the method 
 is essentially the same." 72 When we come to consider more com- 
 plex mental experience, however, it would appear at first blush 
 as if the parallel between the methods of physics and psychology 
 could not be maintained' — as in analysing the mental reaction 
 called out by the presentation of some word-stimulus, or in an 
 attempt to observe a feeling or an emotion. "If you try to report 
 the changes in consciousness, while these changes are in progress, 
 you interfere with consciousness ; your translation of the mental 
 processes into words introduces new factors into that experience 
 itself;" 85 and furthermore "cool consideration of an emotion 
 is fatal to its very existence ; your anger disappears, your disap- 
 pointment evaporates, as you examine it." 87 Direct observation 
 of the process while it is going on in consciousness, is therefore 
 difficult and one solution of the difficulty is to observe it retro- 
 spectively, by making a post mortem examination of it, as it were. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 33 
 
 But even in cases such as these it is not always absolutely neces- 
 sary to employ the retrospective method, for "(a) the observa- 
 tions in question may be repeated", and thus stage after stage of 
 the emotive process may be made the object of analysis; and 
 "moreover, (b) the practiced observer gets into an introspective 
 habit, has the introspective attitude ingrained in his system; so 
 that it is possible for him, not only to take mental notes while the 
 observation is in progress, without interfering with consicousness, 
 but even to jot down written notes, as the histologist does while 
 his eye is still held to the ocular of the microscope". 73 So much 
 for the method of psychology according to Titchener. 
 
 Now let us examine the process by which we become aware of 
 clearness as an attribute of sensory content. We saw how in the 
 course of everyday experience either quality or intensity of sensa- 
 tion might become functionally important and attended to. Thus 
 in the case of an intense stimulus suddenly breaking in upon us, 
 we are aware at the first moment primarily of its intensiveness, 
 and it is only after the first shock is over that we turn our atten- 
 tion exclusively upon its quality in our endeavor to adjust our- 
 selves to this new factor that has been precipitated into the 
 situation of the moment. If our purpose at the moment were 
 the gathering of psychological data, we would have, then and 
 there, the material for it. But our purpose happens to be to get 
 ahead with the day's business and we therefore deal accordingly 
 with the object that had served as an adequate stimulus for that 
 mental experience in which clearness attached first to the intensity 
 and then to the qualitative aspect of a certain sensory content. In 
 attending to the quality of the stimulus for the purpose of discov- 
 ering what it may mean, I am in truth using the method of inspec- 
 tion. I can continue to regard its quality and get it over and over 
 again in a series of perceptual pulses, subject, of course, always to 
 the limitations imposed by fatigue and by the "fluctuation of 
 attention". So too, I could dwell upon its intensity, if necessary. 
 One by one, these various aspects might be made to loom up in 
 the foreground of consciousness. Transferred into the labora- 
 tory, the experimenter can introduce qualitative changes into the 
 
34 CARL RAHN 
 
 stimulus and I would report change in sensory content pari passu 
 as it occurs. I might be clearly aware that the sensation as it 
 exists in consciousness possesses a very low intensity. So too, 
 one might say, duration, and, if one chose, presumably also, ex- 
 tensity of sensation might become the object of our introspections 
 in a way that would be essentially like inspection. But how is it 
 with the attribute of clearness ? Can we focus attention upon it as 
 we can in the case of the other attributes ? Here a difficulty pre- 
 sents itself. Introspection as regards clearness would seem to be 
 impossible in the sense of inspection. The moment we would 
 dwell upon the clearness aspect the content comes into the focus 
 of the field of attention, i.e., there is a change in the aspect con- 
 cerning which we would introspect. Thus it has come to pass 
 that most of that body of knowledge that the psychologist has 
 gathered concerning sensation has been obtained under conditions 
 of maximal clearness; and it is one of the chief counts against 
 the attempts to make the unanalysed content equivalent to the 
 analysed content, for it must yet be shown whether analytic atten- 
 tion does not perhaps effect other changes in the sensory content 
 besides that of clearness. But as regards clearness itself, a low 
 degree of clearness can under normal conditions be determined 
 only retrospectively. While I can attend without difficulty one 
 by one to the qualities that are presented to me for purposes of 
 introspection, until I have reported upon the entire series; and 
 while I can attend one by one to the whole gamut of possible 
 intensities that can be experimentally induced, and note introspec- 
 tively in the sense of inspection my conscious reaction upon each 
 one of them while it exists in consciousness ; — while an observer 
 can do these things in the case of quality and intensity, the situa- 
 tion is otherwise when we come to clearness as an attribute of 
 sensation. The ordinary observer, at least, will have great diffi- 
 culty in noting introspectivly varying degrees of clearness without 
 thereby bringing the content to the focus of attention, i.e., making 
 it maximally clear. Introspection, in the sense of inspection, 
 calm regarding of the content without thereby changing it with 
 respect to that aspect of it with which we are for the time being 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 35 
 
 primarily concerned, is impossible in the case of clearness. He 
 cannot ordinarily note thus the gamut of possible clear- 
 nesses while they are still a part of conscious experience. Our 
 difficulty in introspecting (in the sense of inspecting) a sensa- 
 tion in a state of low degree of clearness, is in a sense similar 
 to that which we experience when we attempt to introspect a 
 feeling while it is still in consciousness. The feeling vanishes 
 when we would attend to it. The unclear sensation may not 
 vanish, to be sure, upon our turning to it, but it is changed with 
 respect to that condition concerning which we were seeking 
 knowledge. 
 
 XIII 
 
 We would now ask : What are the implications of this differ- 
 ence in the status of one of our "attributes"? It appears that 
 not every aspect of sensory experience can be attended to intro- 
 spectively in the sense of inspection. If this be so, then it means 
 that all that large section of our sensory experience that falls 
 within the outer zones of the field of attention cannot be gotten 
 at by direct introspection, but must be attacked by the same 
 methods as are used in the case of emotion and other complex 
 processes that are interfered with when directly attended to. In 
 other words, if clearness be accounted an attribute of sensation, 
 then there is one respect in which it may behave in a manner that 
 is usually regarded as a differentia of emotional and of "complex" 
 processes. Not that at this point we would infer from this that 
 clearness must therefore be conceived as partaking essentially of 
 the character of an attribute of an affective or a complex content. 
 Only this: that it seemingly makes the status of clearness in a 
 certain sense unique among the attributes of sensation, if we 
 regard it as such. And furthermore it raises the question whether 
 the noting of this fact may not have been operative as a motive 
 in the minds of some psychologists in making clearness the attri- 
 bute of some other category, either of content or of function or 
 
36 CARL RAHN 
 
 activity. Thus Stumpf says, "Phenomena with their attributes 
 are given us, stand over against us as somewhat objective, that 
 possesses its own laws, a somewhat that we have merely to 
 describe and acknowledge". (Die Erscheinungen sind uns mit 
 ihren Eigenschaften gegeben, stehen uns als etwas Objektives. 
 Eigengesetzliches gegenuber, das wir nur zu beschreiben und 
 anzuerkennen haben.)® 9 Now this means nothing other than 
 that it is essentially of the nature of phenomena, among them 
 sensation elements, to be present in our consciousness in such a 
 way that they may be calmly inspected and noted while they are 
 a part of our experience. They stand over against us endowed 
 with a certain objectivity, governed by laws of their own. Clear- 
 ness for Stumpf does not behave in this way, and it is significant 
 that he does not make it an attribute of sensory content, but of 
 the activity in which the sensory content is manipulated. It is 
 the attribute of one of the Funktionen, viz., the activity of 
 awareness, of apprehension. 
 
 Thus we are in a position to understand somewhat better 
 Stumpf's doctrine concerning the relation of his phenomena and 
 Funktionen. We become conscious of the Funktionen, in this 
 specific case of the activity of awareness with its attribute of 
 clearness, "by a direction of consciousness that is other than that 
 in which we receive our knowledge of colors". He cites Locke, 
 Leibnitz, Sigwart, Lotze, Brentano, Dilthey, Volkelt, Erdmann, 
 and Lipps. All of these, says Stumpf, "believe that they are 
 able to grasp the psychic life in its very weaving, whereas colors 
 and tones are apprehended merely as contents of acts of aware- 
 ness, i.e., these sensations are apprehended as contents in a special 
 class of psychic activities". 52 
 
 Let us turn now to a consideration of what may be meant by 
 this "other direction of consciousness" by means of which the 
 psychic activities are apprehended. The classic passage in Locke 
 on this point reads as follows : "The mind, receiving the ideas 
 mentioned in the foregoing chapters from without, when it turns 
 its view inward upon itself, and observes its own actions about 
 those ideas it has, takes from thence other ideas, which are as 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 37 
 
 capable to be objects of its contemplation as any of those it re- 
 ceived from foreign things." 38 Some of the "modes of these 
 simple ideas of reflection" are "remembrance, discerning, reason- 
 ing, judging". Let us compare this "turning of the view inward" 
 with the method of observation mentioned by Titchener. He 
 tells us that "the practiced observer has the introspective habit 
 ingrained in his system", so that he can "take mental notes" and 
 even "jot down written notes",while the observation is in progress, 
 and that he can do this "without interfering with consciousness", 
 just "as the histologist does while his eye is still held to the ocular 
 of the microscope". 88 If the phrase "without interfering with 
 consciousness" has any meaning here, it can mean only this : 
 that at this point at least we could not count on Titchener's 
 agreement with us as regards our analysis of the status of clear- 
 ness, when we would attend to this aspect of some marginal 
 experience, qua marginal ; for we believe that it is inherent in the 
 very nature of consciousness that the moment we would intro- 
 spect, in the sense of inspect, that which is now marginal, our 
 attempt to do so results in making it focal, and thus interferes 
 with, changes, in a very real sense, the ongoing consciousness 
 with respect to that very aspect of the activity that we would 
 "inspect". But applying the phrase to our attempt to introspect 
 such aspects of consciousness as the degree of certainty in judg- 
 ment, or such an experience as denial or affirmation (Funktionen 
 for Stumpf, for Titchener, very probably, "attitudes"), it can 
 mean only this: that he can look inward upon the doubt and 
 study it as to its psychological constitution without defeating the 
 ends of the activity in progress, and what is more, without chang- 
 ing the quality of the conscious "feel" of the "attitude" in 
 question. Stumpf, we believe, would take issue with him here. 
 He believes that they may be "given" in a very real sense in 
 consciousness, but "by another direction of consciousness". This 
 we would interpret as meaning that while "doubt" as a conscious 
 somewhat is just as truly present as is the sensory experience of 
 coldness, it is doomed to remain forever peculiarly marginal. 
 Let us turn now for a moment to Locke, whom Stumpf cites in 
 
38 CARL RAHN 
 
 support of his position. It may be that we may get some further 
 light there as to just what it is that constitutes this other class of 
 psychical ultimates. 
 
 The account in Locke is too meagre to give us any basis 
 for inferring whether or not he would say as Titchener does 
 that we can watch the activity from the psychologist's point of 
 view without interfering with the normal process, — but he does 
 say that we may become conscious of the act aspect, that is, while 
 we may not stop to formulate overtly psychological judgments 
 concerning it, we nevertheless find that some feeling of activity, 
 differing from time to time as the situation varies, colors our 
 immediate experience in the course of our efforts to adapt our- 
 selves in our world. Referring to different aspects of this activity 
 consciousness, we may say that we have had a memory experience, 
 an emotion, a volition, or what not. According to Locke, we 
 might be conscious of these activities while attention was busied 
 in the main with the materials with which we are dealing. But 
 the activity aspect is not singled out by attention in the same way 
 as is the perceptual content. . . . When Locke says that anyone 
 can observe the actions of perception and volition within himself, 
 he is without a doubt referring to something immediately experi- 
 enced. These facts of immediate experience are the empirical 
 data for the ideas : thinking, willing. While the concepts of 
 "thinking" and "willing" may arise as a result of discursive 
 thinking, they yet have a basis in immediate conscious experience, 
 viz. : the "operations of the mind about its ideas, including the 
 passions sometimes arising from them, such as the satisfaction or 
 uneasiness arising from any thought". The "foreign things" 
 give rise to "ideas of sensation". But besides the consciousness 
 of such percepts and ideas, we are aware also of the "operations" 
 of our mind. 37 Yet normally it would interfere with the busi- 
 ness in hand if we were to turn to attend to these operations. To 
 attend to the operations of the mind is not the normal pursuit of 
 man, and these awarenesses of mental operations leads a penumbral 
 existence off on the margin of the field in the form of vague 
 "feels", meanings, or what not. Most often, probably, they 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 39 
 
 remain below the threshold without conscious existence. Yet at 
 other times these awarenesses may become very vivid indeed, 
 and if our interests have a psychological bent, these experiences 
 yield material for our ideas of psychological categories. This 
 elaboration into concepts is the work of "reflection" for Locke; 
 for Titchener it probably occurs in the process "of taking mental 
 notes while the observation is in progress, without interfering 
 with consciousness". It is true, therefore, as Stumpf says, that 
 Locke subscribes to the doctrine that we are conscious of, and 
 observe in ourselves, the "actings of the mind", such as "percep- 
 tion, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing". 
 "This source of ideas every man has wholly within hmself ; and 
 though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external 
 objects, yet it is very like, and might properly be called internal 
 sense." For Locke, then, consciousness may be analysed into per- 
 cepts, memories, and imaginations (in Locke's own terminology, 
 all these would be comprehended under the term : ideas of sensa- 
 tion), on the one hand, and consciousness of mental "actings" 
 (giving rise in "reflection" to ideas of reflection), on the other. 
 In this sense it would appear that Stumpf is correct in claiming 
 that Locke taught the possibility of an awareness of Funktion 
 ("actings of the mind"). 
 
 XIV 
 
 Thus Locke and Stumpf. Turning to Titchener, we have seen 
 that for him the immediately given is the percept. It is this that 
 the psychologist analyses into its elements. Titchener is clear on 
 this point : that the sensation and image elements that he analyses 
 out are not given as elements in the immediate experience of 
 the subject, but come to consciousness united into a whole, the 
 percept. His immediately given then is that totality that Locke 
 called an "idea". It is what James has in mind when he speaks of 
 "the objective fact, known to us as the peppermint taste". It 
 is my immediate consciousness of the peppermint, before I note 
 
40 CARL RAHN 
 
 that it is made up of certain sensations of temperature, smell, 
 contact. Now as to Titchener's position as regards the other 
 category, the category of psychic Funktion, of mental activity. 
 He says, "there are, in a certain sense, a hearing, a feeling, a 
 thinking, which are distinguishable from the tone and the pleasure 
 and the thought". 93 If they are "distinguishable" aspects, one 
 might ask why they are not "attributes" in the same sense as the 
 other "attributes", even though they be not "ultimates" as Stumpf 
 would make them ? Logically, it would be somewhat inconsistent 
 to leave them aside, whilst demanding that certain other "attri- 
 butes" which were obtained by a very similar process of "distin- 
 guishing", of analysis, or what not, be attributed to some psy- 
 chological ultimate. And this is practically what he does do when 
 he says : "Only the distinction comes to me, not as that of act and 
 content, but as that of temporal course and qualitative specificity 
 of a single process. . . . The way in which a process runs its 
 course, that is its 'act', that is what constitutes it sensing or feel- 
 ing or thinking; the quality which is thus in passage, that is its 
 'content', that is what constitutes it tone or pleasure." 92 Act 
 and content are for Titchener two ways of looking at the same 
 "process". But we ask: Are not for him the singling out of 
 "intensity" and "quality" also nothing more nor less than "two 
 ways of looking at 'one and the same process' " ? The "acting" is 
 the "temporal course" of his particular types of psychological 
 ultimates, probably their "durational" aspect. The question may 
 become of fundamental interest, however, for certain psycholo- 
 gists, whether these two ways of looking at the same "process" 
 are in any way a factor in the "process". But Titchener is satis- 
 fied to analyse the "single process" into its elementary processes : 
 sensations, images, feelings, and to describe these with reference 
 to their "attributes". He summarily dismisses the claim of the 
 "act psychology" by calling it a psychology of reflection, a psy- 
 chology in which "logical construction has forestalled introspec- 
 tive examination". 93 He believes that "we have in the idea of 
 'process' an instrument of analysis that is adequate to its task, 
 and that it relieves us from the fatal necessity of asking help from 
 logic". 94 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 41 
 
 XV 
 
 Leaving aside Titchener's imputation that the act psychology 
 is a substitution of logic for psychology, let us turn to Stumpf 
 and note once more the distinction that he believes to be funda- 
 mental between his phenomena and his Funktionen. A psycholo- 
 gist such as Stumpf might say to Titchener : Having admitted 
 the "givenness", the "distinguishableness", of the act aspect, 
 would you assert that this aspect comes under the same category 
 as the attributes of intensity and sensory quality? That the 
 durational aspect, the "temporal course" is sufficient to account 
 for the manifold variety seemingly occur ing as regards this 
 activity aspect? Stumpf would affirm you cannot. No other 
 predicate of the activity aspect excepting it be that of duration, 
 can be attributed to the phenomenal aspect. There is a degree of 
 clearness of apprehension, degree of certainty of judgment, etc. 
 (c.f. Section IV above). As regards the second, Stumpf main- 
 tains by definition, that these aspects of activity, cannot be at- 
 tributed to the some category as the other attributes of sensory 
 experience. And his distinction is made on the basis of difference 
 in behavior. 
 
 Stumpf says that his phenomena with their attributes stand 
 over against us as somewhat objective that we have merely to 
 describe and acknowledge. These phenomena, then, as thus 
 defined, would, it seems to us, come unequivocally under the 
 head of those aspects of conscious experience which could be 
 examined introspectively in a manner which would be essentially 
 the same as inspection as it is employed in the physical sciences, 
 as over against retrospection. Here then is a point of departure 
 from which we can start out and examine the status of several 
 fundamental categories in the two psychological systems. 
 
 Titchener and Stumpf would agree in this, we believe; that 
 the sensory and imaginal material that constitutes the bedrock 
 of the perceptual and ideational experiences — that this sensory 
 experience is capable of fixation in such a way that it may be 
 "inspected" (excepting of course the attribute of clearness in the 
 case of Titchener's "sensation elements", which Stumpf would 
 
42 CARL RAHN 
 
 make an attribute of Funktion), in such a way that it may be 
 calmly regarded, observations made concerning its duration, qual- 
 ity, intensity and any changes that occur in these aspects from 
 time to time. Stumpf's statement concerning his phenomena 
 would indicate agreement on this point. 
 
 On the other hand we believe that if we were to take the list 
 of categories of Funktionen, of mental acts in Stumpf's sense, 
 we should find that the attributes in terms of which they are 
 according to him given to us, will show that these, as aspects of 
 consciousness, must be subsumed under the second heading on 
 the basis of behavior when attended to introspectively. They 
 are all aspects that change or evanesce when attention would focus 
 upon them as psychical. "Cool consideration of an emotion is 
 fatal to its very existence ; your anger disappears, your disappoint- 
 ment evaporates as you examine it," says Titchener. 86 Try to 
 fixate the willing, judging, comparing, and the other intellectual 
 acts, in so far as they throw any reflection into consciousness over 
 and above the object willed, the idea judged, the contents, whether 
 perceptual or ideational, that are compared, — try to fixate these, 
 and the activity is balked. The degree of clearness, according to 
 Stumpf the attribute of the Funktion of awareness or appre- 
 hension, cannot, we saw, be directly attended to for purposes of 
 psychological study. The same thing holds of doubt. Try to 
 fix attention upon the doubt as a mental somewhat and the 
 "doubt" consciousness is replaced by something other that may 
 be sensation or what not, but it no longer is that consciousness 
 which everyone, when called upon, refers to as doubt. So too, 
 the consciousness of certainty in judgment. So too in the case 
 of that "plus" which gives to an experience memory tang rather 
 than a perceptual coloring, or that which constitutes negation 
 rather than affirmation' — so too, in recognition desiring, etc. In 
 all these there is a very actual consciousness that is not focal, 
 but marginal, and that eludes us when we try to introspect it 
 directly, in the sense of inspection, in the sense in which we seem 
 to inspect the "object" with which we are dealing during these 
 experiences, i.e. in the percept, the memory image, the matter-of- 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 43 
 
 fact assented to or dissented from. It is here that the psycholo- 
 gist appears to be under the unfortunate curse that the moment 
 he would lay his hands directly on one of these states of con- 
 sciousness it turns to dust and ashes at his touch. Try to catch 
 the doubt, as it passes through the living consciousness, and you 
 destroy it and come away with shreds of sensation located in 
 muscle of head and eyelid and mouth. Try to introspect the 
 consciousness of certainty and what just now was a very vital 
 aspect of immediate experience turns to nothingness. You can 
 experience it, but you cannot inspect it. And it seems it is there- 
 fore that Stumpf says that "it is by another direction of conscious- 
 ness" that we become aware of the Fitnktionen. While one might 
 have welcomed greater explicitness on this point, we do not believe 
 that we are guilty of misinterpretation when we infer that this 
 statement has reference to the method by which they may become 
 objects of psychological knowledge for us. We may infer that 
 they are intrinsically so constituted, that they may not be appre- 
 hended introspectively in the same way as are the phenomena. 
 We are further convinced that this is the real ground for 
 Stumpf s distinction, between phenomena and Funktionen by the 
 fact that he makes clearness an attribute not of phenomena but 
 of Funktion — and we have already seen that clearness as an 
 aspect of conscious experience seemingly behaved differently from 
 the usually recognized sensation attributes when we purposed to 
 gather introspective data concerning it. For these reasons we 
 believe that we are justified in the interpretation just given 
 and we shall proceed to a study of the legitimacy and the 
 implications of a classification of psychological processes on the 
 basis of the manner in which they behave when an attempt is made 
 to observe them. Applying this provisional criterion to Stumpf's 
 categories, it would appear that his phenomena would come under 
 the head of those conscious processes that can be examined intro- 
 spectively in a manner which would be essentially the same as 
 "inspection," and our justification in proceeding thus lies in the 
 character of Stumpf's definition which is couched essentially in 
 terms of the behavior alluded to above. 
 
44 CARL RAHN 
 
 As regards procedure, therefore, we cannot agree with Titch- 
 ener that the method of psychology is essentially the same as that 
 of the physical sciences, viz., that of immediate inspection of the 
 material that constitutes the objects of the science; for it appears 
 that some aspects or complexes of consciousness normally cannot 
 be directly inspected without interfering with that aspect with 
 reference to which we are seeking psychological data ; it may be, 
 perhaps, that the methods can be the same when we are dealing 
 with certain aspects of consciousness, but it must be essentially 
 different when we are dealing with these others that are "tran- 
 sient, elusive, slippery," those that "refuse to be observed while 
 they are in passage." So long as "cool consideration of an 
 emotion is fatal to its very existence," so long as "your anger 
 disappears, your disappointment evaporates, as you examine it," 
 so long as we must thus qualify the statement that the psycholo- 
 gist observes his objects in the same way as the physicist does his, 
 just so long must we recognize a difference in behavior on the part 
 of the mental processes that we are studying, a difference in 
 behavior that necessitates a different mode of attack on the part 
 of the psychologist; and we must be careful to refrain from 
 stating propositions that may in any way be taken as general 
 when in reality they are particular or qualified, such as "intro- 
 spection is very like inspection," "in general, the method of 
 psychology is much the some as the method of physics," "the 
 method of the physical and the psychological sciences is sub- 
 stantially the same." 74 
 
 XVI 
 
 Following this line of immanent criticism of our psychological 
 systems, we have come to the distinction between phases of 
 conscious experience that are amenable to immediate survey, and 
 other phases that under normal conditions elude inspection for 
 psychological purposes, that cannot be focused upon without 
 changing or destroying them. By means of this distinction let 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 45 
 
 us examine the several psychological categories and let us note 
 just what happens when the conscious experiences designated by 
 them are attended to. There is the Funktion of Stumpf, the 
 "attitude" of Titchener, the meaningful percept and idea — all to be 
 examined in this manner; and finally the "sensation" of current 
 psychology, which seemingly has in common with Stumpf's 
 phenomena that it may be examined, attended to, "inspected," 
 without changing it or interfering with it as a conscious 
 "process." 
 
 XVII 
 
 Referring to the experience of doubt which Locke and Stumpf 
 would designate as an "acting of the mind," as a Funktion, we 
 saw that it may be definitely an aspect of conscious experience, 
 yet when attention turns from that which is doubted and tries 
 to catch the doubt itself, it will surprise not the doubt, but per- 
 haps certain muscular sensations mediated by contractions of the 
 facial muscles. There are to be found nowhere in the litera- 
 ture, since James' inimitable chapter on the will, finer and 
 keener introspective accounts of -just such "catchings" of these 
 fleeting mental states, of "attitudes", than those recently given by 
 Titchener in his survey of the "experimental psychology of 
 thinking". 96 On the side of investigations of muscular expres- 
 sion belonging to various forms of intellectual activity, there is 
 excellent material collected by Sancto de Sanctis in his "Mimicry 
 of Thinking". But the objection is unanswerable that these 
 kinaesthetic sensations that attention lights upon when it pounces 
 upon such a subtle psychosis as a state of doubt, are not the 
 psychic equivalents of the state itself. As Titchener says concern- 
 ing emotion : "a group of organic sensations is, after all, a group 
 of organic sensations; palpitation of the heart, is not, in itself, the 
 emotion of dread, and blushing is not, in itself, the emotion of 
 shame." 81b Concerning recognition, again, which is essentially 
 of the nature of Funktion, Angell says ; "In all instances of con- 
 
46 CARL RAHN 
 
 scious recognition however, it must be remembered that the 
 mental act of explicit recognition is something unique ; something 
 which is not simply synonymous with the accompanying condi- 
 tions which we have been describing." 1 In the case of emotion 
 (which the Funktion-psychologen rank among the psychic activi- 
 ties) we find the problem already attacked. A theory such as 
 the James-Lange theory of the emotions avers that in this total 
 state the emotional tang is given, in a large measure at least, by 
 the sensory back-stroke arising from certain organic and muscu- 
 lar reactions that have been reflexly set up in the organism. The 
 facts at the basis of this theory are ascertainable by means of the 
 "pouncing" above described and by the method of objective 
 observation. The "pouncing" reveals certain organic and kinaes- 
 thetic experiences; objective observation of the person during 
 the emotional state itself shows certain objective movements, and 
 apparatus properly applied would reveal certain circulatory and 
 respiratory changes which tally with the subject's introspective 
 account of what was present at the time when the emotional 
 aspect of the total experience was "pounced" upon. Xow in 
 using these data in the explanation of the emotional psychosis, 
 the psychologist does not affirm that the consciousness of the 
 analyzing experience is the same as the emotional phase itself ; but 
 he does believe that he has grounds for assuming that the sensory 
 stimulation that functions in mediating the "sensations" precipi- 
 tated by the analysis, was operative in the original state and lent 
 color to it. The modern psychologist is too conscious of the 
 "Jabberwock of the psychologist's fallacy" to be guilty of com- 
 mitting it at a point where it is so easily detectable as here. He 
 realizes that the emotion is not the equivalent of sensation a plus 
 sensation b plus certain affective elements, etc., that are the 
 products of analysis, — but that the emotion was experienced 
 differently, not under conditions of analytic attention ready to 
 note any organic or kinaesthetic sensations that might arise, but 
 as a unified conscious reaction upon a stimulus that is an adequate 
 provocative of that particular form of racial response. 
 
 The method of investigation of the consciousness of intellectual 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 47 
 
 Funktionen and of "attitudes" must be essentially the same as 
 that in the case of emotion. The introspective data gathered after 
 the manner described by Titchener, the objective expressive 
 signs accompanying the different types of concentration and 
 intellectual process, as given by deSanctis, introspective obser- 
 vation (in the sense of retrospection) as to how far the changes 
 in the pattern of the percepts and ideas, that are at the focus 
 of attention, may contribute to this consciousness of mental 
 activity, — these will constitute an analytic account of the activity 
 consciousness. And while it is thus analytic, such an account will 
 not fail to do justice to the fact that the "feel" of the activity 
 consciousness as a real vital experience appeared to consist in a 
 somewhat quite other than merely the consciousness of the 
 sensory factors just described. Indeed, such an account will 
 recognize that while it is necessary to attribute some function to 
 kinaesthetic stimulation and to changes in the content at the focm 
 of attention, in bringing about the consciousness of psychic 
 activity — this function will yet be different in the original ex- 
 perience than under conditions of analytic attention. One differ- 
 ence in behavior of the sensory factor is this, that just as in 
 emotional experience, it is not at the focus but at the margin of 
 field of attention. All considerations that were urged a while 
 ago on this point must be taken into account. ... To determine 
 these differences in the sensory content under different condi- 
 tions of clearness, i.e., of focal and marginal apprehension, is one 
 of the problems that is just now confronting psychology. Another 
 difference is this: that in the original experience these various 
 stimuli functioned in evoking an unanalysed unified response of 
 consciousness. And, we believe, closely related to this, is the 
 third difference. The difference in the "feel" of these stimuli 
 in the original and in the analytic experience. In the original 
 experience this sensory stimulation gave rise to a different "feel" 
 from that which arises in analytic attention: there it signified 
 doubting, affirming, negating, desiring, rejecting, attending, pur- 
 posing, analysing, believing, discriminating; here it signifies 
 so many sensory-"elements"-precipitated-in-pursuance-of-our- 
 
48 CARL RAHN 
 
 attempt-todiscover,-to-know,-what-doubting-affirming,-purposing 
 -really-is. It is this "meaning" or "feel" aspect, we believe, that 
 Stumpf hypostatizes as his awareness of psychic Funktion which 
 for him is "immediately given" in the same sense in which his 
 "phenomena" are immediately given. 
 
 We trust that we will not be misunderstood in designating the 
 consciousness of Funktion, of act, a meaning. It will be better 
 perhaps to leave this term to express the analogous aspect of per- 
 cepts, ideas and concepts, and to speak, in the case of the Funk- 
 tionen, of the "feel" of the act, without of course, implying nec- 
 essarily the presence of affective factors in this "consciousness of 
 act". But the problem is for us essentially the same in the case 
 of the "feel" of the mental act, and the "meaning" of a percept 
 or idea. It suffices here to note that in the case of the conscious- 
 ness of psychic Funktionen and of attitudes, when such arises 
 within the total consciousness, it is the analogue of the meaning 
 aspect in the case of percept or idea consciousness. It is this that 
 is changed, that evanesces, that will not suffer immediate fixation. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 Let us turn now to an examination of the percept and idea at 
 the hand of our provisional criterion of behavior under condi- 
 tions of immediate fixation. I glance over a page before me and 
 a word catches my eye. The consciousness of the word is a per- 
 cept. There is a presentation and it comes to me meaningfully. If 
 I continue to dwell upon its meaning, this appears to remain the 
 same, only it becomes what we are pleased to call : more explicit. 
 Images arise in consciousness organically connected with the 
 meaning. The totality is the percept. Analytically there is the 
 sensory stimulus, the visual impression of the letters on the page. 
 Added to this there may be in consciousness an auditory image of 
 the word, and kinaesthetic images, or even sensations, of its 
 enunciation. But this is not all, there is the meaning. The 
 visual impression, the auditory image, the kinaesthesia ;< — these 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 49 
 
 are not the meaning — they "call up" the meaning. Dwelling 
 upon this meaning aspect results in making "explicit" what be- 
 fore, at the first glance at the word, appeared "implicit" ; and the 
 process of becoming explicit is the unfolding of a new perceptual 
 and ideational complex, germane to the initial ones, yet not the 
 same. This new complex may again be analysed into sensory or 
 image elements with a halo or fringe of meaning. Try to fixate 
 this halo or fringe and once more it becomes explicit in the form 
 of another idea and so our attempt to fixate the meaning as a 
 psychic content leads us ever on to other though related ideas. 
 The attempt to introspect the meaning aspect of percepts and 
 ideas, then, is impossible in the sense of immediate inspection. 
 The point we would stress here is only this : that the attempt to 
 "catch" the meaning results in the coming into consciousness of 
 a new ideational complex with its new meaning — or else you find 
 yourself contemplating the objective stimulus, qua stimulus, that 
 had given rise to the original percept — or else you "come to" 
 from out of a period of seeming nothingness. 3 
 
 XIX 
 
 But let us see what happens when we attempt the analysis by 
 concentrating attention not on the meaning aspect of the percept, 
 but upon the stimulus aspect. We must remember that in the 
 ordinary perceptual experience there is no differentiation of these 
 two aspects, and it is only because in problematic situations the 
 two have become differentiated, that we assume that every actual 
 percept of ordinary experience has these two aspects. The exper- 
 ience in which the distinction first comes to consciousness may be 
 described as follows: Say that we are looking at a word on a 
 page and fix attention upon its visual form, upon its sound, upon 
 our enunciation of it. It carries with it its accustomed "meaning," 
 but presto! we suddenly say: "Curious — that this collection of 
 visual things, this sound, these enunciatory movements, should 
 mean that." If we continue to look at the word or contemplate 
 
50 CARL RAHN 
 
 its sound, or the feel of it in our throats, its meaning becomes 
 more and more effectually estranged from it. Attention is busied 
 with noting parts and relations in the sensory complex, and this 
 thing that for us was ever so familiar now becomes a monster of 
 strangeness. New associations flash through our minds that are 
 a result of our attention simply to the form of the word. 
 
 It is in experiences such as these that the psychological dis- 
 tinction between stimulus and its meaning has its rise. For 
 many persons, children especially, this process of divorcing the 
 auditory, visual and kinaesthetic stuff, both sensory and imaginal, 
 from the "meaning" of a word possesses a great fascination. 
 This process, this act of separating, may therefore become a 
 veritable habit and can be operative not only in the case of 
 words, but also in the case of the perception of the common 
 objects of daily life. It is this that the modern mystics have 
 made the central feature of their method of reaction upon 
 the experience that the life of our day yields them. It is thus 
 that they re-introduce into their world the sense of mystery that 
 for the common run of men is fast becoming an unknown thing. 
 The extent of scientific control of our objective world has become 
 so great that small margin is left for arousing reactions of won- 
 der, awe and mystery. Yet by the apprehension of the significance 
 of the psychological process just outlined, the modern man and 
 woman of the "mystic temper" has found the way that leads back 
 into the world of mystery, a world more wonderful by far than 
 any wherein dwelt their predecessors of early days, for the modern 
 mystic enters the world of beauty not through a narrow range of 
 experiences as did the mystic of old ; no, every experience of the 
 common life is to-day the gateway that leads thither. . . . But we 
 shall return anon to this relation between "stimulus" and 
 "meaning." 
 
 The citation of cases of the genesis of the distinction between 
 stimulus and meaning is not made for the purpose of leading up 
 to a discussion of what meaning is, but rather for the purpose of 
 noting what happens when attention tries to analyze the percept 
 by focusing upon the presentation aspect. We saw that focusing 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 51 
 
 attention upon the meaning aspect resulted not in new light on 
 what meaning "really" was, but tended to bring into consciousness 
 other though related ideational content. We see now that atten- 
 tion to the stimulus aspect likewise tends to disintegrate the 
 original percept, divorcing the stimulus from the original meaning 
 and bringing it, the stimulus, to consciousness in a new way; i.e., 
 it acquires new meanings that arise in consciousness with the new 
 pattern into which the stimulus falls under our continued inspec- 
 tion. And if our interests are psychological, the stimulation will 
 take on the meaning of "sensations" and "images" that have 
 certain "attributes" with reference to which we may examine 
 them. The old meaning has fled and instead there is the new 
 one that accrues to the stimulus through the new situation and its 
 dominant purpose of psychological analysis. The meaning is 
 gone, but the "sensations" remain. We see therefore once more 
 that now when the distinction between stimulus and meaning has 
 already become ours and we attempt to get at the percept by 
 fixating attention upon the stimulus aspect, the original experience 
 is changed in the process, the original meaning evanesces and we 
 find that analytic attention is contemplating a congeries of "sen- 
 sations," or in the case of the idea, an "image"-complex. 
 
 So our attempt to "inspect" a percept or an idea results in the 
 precipitation of "sensations" in a process analogous to the one in 
 which we erstwhile attempted to fixate an aspect of consciousness 
 giving us the "feel" of some mental "activity", an awareness of 
 hesitation, of doubt, of concentration, or what not. There we 
 saw that the "feel" evanesced and that attention was focused 
 either upon "organic attitude and its kinaesthetic representa- 
 tion," 96 or else there was an immediate memory of that phase of 
 the perceptual and ideational process that was going on in the 
 original experience at the moment when the "feel" of activity was 
 present. So, too, here, in the case of our attempt to fixate the 
 percept we find that it is impossible to introspect in the sense of 
 "inspection" without interfering with the conscious activity that 
 is going on. The "meaning" evanesces and we find that atten- 
 tion is busied with the contemplation of the "sensations" that 
 
52 CARL RAHN 
 
 are mediated by the stimulus, and of their configuration and 
 "attributes." 
 
 XX 
 
 Here, however, in our search we have come upon something: 
 in the way of consciousness that seemingly can be examined, in 
 the words of Titchener, by a method that is substantially the 
 same as the method of the physical sciences. In the words of 
 Stumpf we are now dealing with sensations, one of the classes 
 of phenomena that "stand over against us as somewhat objective, 
 that possesses its own laws, a somewhat that we have merely to 
 describe and acknowledge." And so for the third time we return 
 to a consideration of that factor in consciousness that, above all 
 others, appears to many of us as most palpable, most substantial 
 and least elusive. Yet its palpability, substantiality, relative 
 stability, may be only seeming; though compared with other 
 aspects of conscious life, it appears like a great rock into whose 
 shadow we may ever return, from our wearisome chase after the 
 psychical. But Trdvra petand "the eternal hills are little by little 
 breaking up and wearing away," and in that "great rock" 
 changes, too, may be relentlessly going on. Figures aside — let us 
 examine likewise the behavior of the sensory aspect under condi- 
 tions of introspective attention with a view to discovering in what 
 sense, if any, it may be said that it can be "inspected" without 
 introducing changes into it, without interfering with it. 
 
 Let us begin by taking Titchener' s example illustrative of what 
 is for him unambiguously a case of sensory experience. "Take 
 one of the familiar puzzle pictures, a picture which represents, we 
 will say, a house and a garden, and somewhere in which there is 
 concealed the outline of a human face. As you search for the 
 face, the contents of the whole picture are at the conscious focus. 
 Suddenly you find it: and what happens? Why, as you do so, 
 the picture drops clean away from the focus; the face stands 
 out with all imaginable clearness, and the house and garden are 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 53 
 
 no clearer than the feel of the paper between your fingers. The 
 experience is very striking, as I have described it: it is more 
 striking still, if the face bafBes you, and you go off on false scents. 
 For every time that you think that you have found the hidden 
 outline, the picture slips from you, — slips, to come back with a 
 mental jerk as you realize your failure." The "mental jerk" is 
 exquisitely descriptive of the way in which a new meaning attaches 
 to a stimulus. For Titchener, to be sure, it is a change of clearness 
 in the sensory content, yet the fact that he describes is patent 
 enough. What before was, at most, vague, is now made clear, 
 and its clearness comes in with a mental jerk. Now it is in this 
 moment of mental jerk that we become aware of the fact that 
 the previous awareness of this content was far vaguer than just 
 at this point of entrance of the interpretation in which the part- 
 content is unified and brought to the crest of the wave of sensory 
 attention. The point to note is this: that the sudden coming 
 to the crest on the part of the part-content may become the 
 occasion of the psychological judgment that the sensory content 
 which is the basis of the new percept is now clearer by far than 
 just a moment ago. And now, having found the face in the 
 picture, the psychologist might ask, does the face, or rather, does 
 the sensory experience that constitutes the percept "face", do these 
 sensations continue at the initial level of clearness or not ? Since 
 Titchener has not carried the psychological description further, 
 we shall attempt it ourselves. Having found the face, we may do 
 one of two things: dismiss the whole matter and turn to the 
 business of life, serious or otherwise; or we may continue for a 
 while longer to attend to the face. Again, if we do the latter, we 
 shall discover later, upon retrospection, that one of three things 
 has happened, i. We suddenly found that the sensations mean- 
 ing "face" have wandered off, and instead we are thinking of 
 other things; further retrospection may discover to us, perhaps, 
 the associative nexus that lead from "face" to the present 
 ideational content. 2. Or we note that attention continued to 
 focus upon the sensory material before us and specifically upon 
 that part of the content that was welded together in the face- 
 
54 CARL RAHN 
 
 percept, but that we did not rest content with the initial total 
 face-meaning, and went on to attend to nose, eyes, ears, mouth, 
 etc. If in so doing we saw something unusual in the conforma- 
 tion of any of these parts, say in the shape of the nose, we note, 
 retrospectively once more, that such apprehensions seem to come 
 home to us with another mental jerk, slighter perhaps than the 
 original one, yet nevertheless with more clearness than attaches 
 to one which is representative of an accustomed type. 3. Or in 
 the third place we may find retrospectively that we have done 
 neither of these things after choosing to busy ourselves further 
 with the face, rather than to return to the duties of the day. We 
 may have looked again, and then again, at this face, trying per- 
 haps to get once more some subtle general impression that was 
 imbedded in our original perceptual reaction upon the part- 
 content. We continue to look at the face and succeed in getting 
 the impression sought, — and then we find that we have gone off 
 into a doze, or have even fallen asleep, and are aroused only by 
 some sudden stimulus, more or less intense, external or internal. 
 The many methods of putting one's self to sleep by "watching 
 the sheep jump over the stile", or "looking at the tip of one's 
 nose", — all have this element in common, and their effectiveness 
 in many instances cannot be questioned. 
 
 We note this third type of general behavior also in the case 
 of another actual experience, viz. : in one of the methods used to 
 induce hypnotic sleep. A bright metallic ball may be placed before 
 us and we are told to center our whole attention upon it. Pur- 
 suant to this command we focus upon it. We are to "think" of 
 nothing else, but just fixate the ball. Very well, we note the 
 form, then its size,' — just try to "apprehend" them. If attention 
 would go off on the track of associated ideas, we nevertheless 
 feel a "pull" back to the ball. The distribution of light and shade 
 upon its surface "strikes" us. Then we note the color, etc., but 
 soon the possible ways of apprehending the ball without calling 
 up other objects is exhausted and so once more we go through 
 the various ways of apprehension just mentioned. While the 
 perceptions were thus being repeated over and over, conscious- 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 55 
 
 ness as a whole sinks ever to a lower level, and unless in some 
 way the total situation becomes operative by arousing in us 
 some strong impulsive reaction such as is involved in the thought 
 of the "unworthiness" of this our conduct in which we are giving 
 ourselves over into the control of another — unless something of 
 this sort happens, we soon are in an hypnotic sleep. 
 
 Again, in the case of ambiguous drawings, when one meaning 
 is "in", and the other is "out", the two alternate rapidly enough, 
 but never is the stimulus apprehended in both ways at once. It is 
 another question how it is that we may "know" that the other 
 meaning is possible. And it is beside our purpose to touch upon 
 that here, except to note the fact that in the complex conscious- 
 ness, it would appear that at times we do have some sort of 
 awareness of the potentiality of this other perception. It may be 
 that this is analogous to our awareness of the whole to which a 
 part belongs, but this problem will occupy us elsewhere. Here let 
 us note only that the sensory stimulation tends to release alternately 
 two perceptual reactions. In these cases in which the sensory 
 stimulation attended to is coterminus in the two interpretations, 
 the same "mental jerk" is experienced as in the case of the 
 puzzle picture in which a part was abstracted in the perception 
 of the hidden face. Since the sensory field that is involved in 
 the area of maximal clearness remains the same in the case of 
 the ambiguous figure, we can there interpret the facts only by 
 saying that that which with interpretation A had been made 
 clear, had in the meantime become vague and is once more 
 brought to maximal clearness with the coming in of interpreta- 
 tion B. 
 
 Now a "sensation" too, behaves as do those supposedly "com- 
 plex" objects of perception. In our attempt to "inspect" it, 
 Titchener tells us, we may perceive it now with this "attribute" 
 in the foreground of attention and now that. 84 Whenever any 
 aspect of the sensory stimulation arouses consciousness to a 
 maximal degree, it was always a case of a consciousness of that 
 particular aspect of the stimulation coming as its meaning. The 
 stimulation that finds no reflex pathway over which to discharge 
 
56 CARL RAHN 
 
 in terms of established reflexes calls out the attention reflex as its 
 response and this phase of the impeded activity is precipitated 
 into consciousness as the total situation: "what's that?" and thus 
 opens the pathways for possible discharge by way of the cortex. 
 This coming to clearness in consciousness on the part of the 
 various aspects of the "sensation" is in every way like the "mental 
 jerk" by which Titchener describes the coming of a new percept. 
 In the period just following the jerk there is no awareness of a 
 subsidence of the clearness of the "sensation", but such a de- 
 crease is inferred from the fact that in the new pulse of perceptual 
 reaction, the content once more becomes maximally clear. The 
 attempt to keep the sensation in consciousness, as in the case of 
 the metal ball experience, results eventually in a lowering of the 
 degree of clearness of consciousness to the threshold of sleep. 
 
 Since the attributes behave thus in every way as do the 
 meanings of "complex" percepts, coming now one to the focus 
 of consciousness and now another, there is some ground to doubt 
 the claim of "sensation" that must have all its attributes in con- 
 sciousness or none, — to the place of a psychological ultimate. For 
 if in the case of ambiguous drawings it is not necessary for the 
 two possible meanings to be in consciousness at the same time as 
 "percepts", — if indeed it is not only not necessary but in the 
 nature of the case impossible to have the two present as "percepts" 
 at one and the same time — but that one of them, if it be repre- 
 sented in consciousness at all can be present as "idea" merely, 
 then it must be shown why the various "attributes", which other- 
 wise behave in every way as do the several meanings of ambiguous 
 objects, should form an exception in this one respect: their 
 inseparable presence in consciousness. 
 
 If it be true that we can single out some one "attribute" of 
 sensation, say the brightness of a visual experience, and focus 
 upon it, and that "we may have very hazy ideas about quality and 
 duration" 84 as when a bright light suddenly flashed before us on 
 a dark night, — if in that case brightness be the attribute focused 
 upon, and our "ideas" of the other attributes may be very, very 
 vague, how are we to determine the point of vagueness beyond 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 57 
 
 which they may not go, unless they would drag the whole sensa- 
 tion down below the threshold ? The more restricted attention is, 
 at this critical moment of our experience, upon the intensity 
 phase, the nearer the danger of its forcing the other aspects below 
 the threshold of consciousness — and presto! the whole light sen- 
 sation would have to disappear, if it were true that the "nullifying 
 of any attribute annihilates the sensation." 84 But it is far from 
 our purpose to caricature a venerable concept. We are voicing 
 only a growing conviction that the concept is in need of recon- 
 struction and reinterpretation. 
 
 We find that the "attributes" of "sensation" behave just as do 
 "meanings" in the case of ambiguous drawings. The different 
 aspects come to consciousness with the same "mental jerk" ; when 
 one "attribute" is in the foreground the others recede, just as two 
 interpretations of a stimulus in the case of the drawings; and like 
 the attempt to keep some particular conscious state in which a 
 certain meaning is imbedded, static, so, too, the attempt to keep 
 consciousness narrowed down to some particular "attribute" of 
 the "sensation" results in a stultification of the process or the 
 annihilation of consciousness. 
 
 We conclude therefore that "attributes" are but some of the 
 meanings which the sensory stimulus may arouse in conscious- 
 ness. They are the products of a process of abstraction. And 
 if the quality appears to be the "body" of the sensation, this is 
 attributable, we believe, to the fact that the qualitative reaction, 
 the putting over against each other of the various qualities of a 
 sense department is the more habitual one.* The meaning of 
 quality, therefore, when the sensation is observed introspectively, 
 is the one that strikes us most forcibly. On the other hand the 
 day we first experience an inkling of the distinction of satura- 
 tion from the other qualitative aspects of visual sensation, is a 
 "new" day for us; the color experience is henceforth different 
 from that of former times, and this increase in richness is 
 synchronous with the rise of the distinction. We need not 
 necessarily have names for these new aspects, but the point is 
 
 * Ci. above, Section X. 
 
58 CARL RAHN 
 
 that it is in the analytic process that the new aspect comes to 
 consciousness — and to say that it was always present is to blink 
 the fact of difference for the sake of theory. The coming of the 
 subtler aspects into the field of consciousness dates from the day 
 of their first singling out and their presence comes home to us, 
 often, before we have a name to affix to our new way of reacting 
 to the stimulus. This new way of reacting is the essential thing 
 to be noted. To say that the differences existed before they were 
 noted, is tantamount to taking the position of those who affirm 
 the distinction between psychic reality and conscious actuality 
 (Kiilpe), phenomena and Funktion (Stumpf), content and act 
 (Brentano). (We might add here also Wundt, who speaks of 
 inherent agreements and differences in "psychical processes" on 
 the one hand, and of the "comparing activity by which we per- 
 ceived" the relations. This latter activity "is different from the 
 agreements and differences themselves and additional to 
 them".) 107 
 
 Our point here is only this : that the actual sensory experience 
 cannot be regarded as being a function only of the physical 
 and the physiological processes of the peripheral stimulation and 
 afferent nervous impulses, but also of the "set" of the nervous 
 system as a whole. If the saturation aspect is to be the "attribute" 
 of the "sensation" as a conscious experience, then in the case of 
 those who maintain that the conscious response to one and the 
 same type of sensory stimulus is different before and after they 
 have been put into the attitude in which they become aware of 
 that aspect in a definite way, — this aspect cannot be "attributed" 
 in the same way to the earlier and later sensory responses as 
 actual, conscious experiences. 
 
 Hypothetically we might suppose that the beginnings of the 
 "attitudes" that are the condition for this modification of experi- 
 ence as sensory, are to be found in certain reflex or instinctive 
 responses.* These, accompanied by certain emotional reactions, 
 might thus affect the machinery of consciousness. But this would 
 be quite other than an "immediate" cognitive reaction by way of 
 *See below, Section XXXIII. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 59 
 
 the cortex to this particular aspect, and would probably be denied 
 by all who deal in elementary sensory "ultimates" ; yet it may well 
 be that such a statement of the psycho-physical processes involved 
 in sensory experience will some day come to be regarded as being 
 more serviceable than our altogether too simple conception of 
 psychical element. 110 
 
 The "sensation", that by definition "comes into consciousness 
 only and always with all its attributes", is a logical construct, in 
 the same sense in which every other "ideal object" is a logical 
 construct, and psychologically it behaves just as every other 
 "complex" object. It is in the conscious reactions now to this 
 problematic situation, now to that, as they arise in the breaks in 
 more or less automatic habitual responses, that the various "attri- 
 butes" that constitute the sensation come to consciousness. The 
 admission that within the "sensation" itself there may exist two- 
 degrees of clearness, is sufficient to make it complex. Its very 
 existence is dependent upon the functioning of a selective activity 
 and it depends upon the situation what aspect is to be selected out.. 
 And since the "sensation" turns out to be a complex object, that 
 behaves like every other object that may come to consciousness, 
 with different shades of meaning, then the dwelling upon it, in the 
 sense of "inspection", is impossible without interfering with the 
 "process" as it normally would go on, for it must result either in 
 bringing out new "meanings", aspects that were not in con- 
 sciousness in the same way before, or else, as in the case of 
 all attempts to keep "meanings" static, in an annihilation of 
 consciousness. 
 
 XXI 
 
 Pursuing this line of criticism we come to believe that not 
 even in the case of the "sensation" with its attributes can we 
 introspect in the sense of inspection without interfering with, or 
 modifying, the on-going process. To observe a sensory experi- 
 ence results in putting the "sensation" into a new setting. The 
 
60 CARL RAHN 
 
 system of associations into which it is received is quite other than 
 that in which it existed in the original experience." Yet one 
 might say that that is the very thing that was wanted. However 
 differently we may have reacted to the stimulation under other 
 conditions, it is under the guidance of a psychological purpose that 
 one would discover what the facts concerning the simplest sort of 
 conscious reaction to a given stimulus "really" are. Let it 
 mean psychical element, if you will, but in narrowing down con- 
 sciousness to the sensation experience, and noting that it, after 
 all, was complex, have we not found a type of process that was 
 about as simple as could be, viz., the various attributive aspects of 
 sensory experience ? And further, one might say, given a psycho- 
 logical purpose to start with, we could then have the conditions 
 necessary for attending to a psychical process that was ele- 
 mentary, simple, in the first place, and secondly was one into 
 which introspection would not be introducing changes while the 
 observation was in progress. In other words we should have the 
 conditions given for a case in which introspection would be very 
 like inspection. . . This would verily be a case in point. The 
 conditions would be very similar to the case of the attempt to 
 induce hypnotic sleep cited a while ago. Only here, the command 
 from without is replaced by the purpose within. Yet the two have 
 this in common : they would function effectually in cutting off all 
 avenues of association excepting the one that means : a particular 
 sensation attribute. Having thus stultified mental activity by 
 means of the purpose, we fix upon the attribute ; and having fix- 
 ated it, what next? . . . We try to get it over and over again, 
 just sheer awareness of quality, say. We cannot vary the mon- 
 otony by noting the other attributes that we have been accustomed 
 to note with regard to a stimulus, so the apprehension of the one 
 aspect simply repeats itself. We do not deny that we are con- 
 structing a hypothetical case, yet we have some basis for it in 
 concrete experience. Who has not at times sat staring at the wall 
 of his room, his mind a "perfect blank" except for the awareness 
 of the color of the wall? The color would become clear in re- 
 peated perceptions, along with the name, perhaps, as an auditory 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 61 
 
 image, or as an incipient enunciation of the word. There appears 
 to be somewhat of a perceptual pulse, — whether or not this be a 
 function of the "rhythm of attention", so-called, need not detain 
 us here. Another instance from the class-room may also be a 
 case in point. We go to a session of a class immediately after 
 partaking of the noon-day meal. We are drowsy and would doze 
 off if it were not that we might be called upon to respond, and 
 that bit of "knowledge" is more or less effective in keeping us 
 awake. But if it be a lecture, we have a more difficult time of it. 
 We soon cease to form the associations that it is the lecturer's 
 purpose to call up in our minds. The effort is too great, espe- 
 cially if it be a technical mode of expression that is being used. 
 The words soon begin to strike us merely as sounds. But for the 
 sake of courtesy we try to keep up the appearance of attention, 
 and we come back to the fading auditory stimulation with a jerk. 
 We shall not here try to analyze out the difference between those 
 "comings back" that carry with them the "feel" of being a func- 
 tion of the stimulus, and those that appear somehow to be due to 
 the inner pulling together resulting from a vague appreciation of 
 the social situation. Suffice it to say that purpose and stimulus 
 each appear to influence the pulses of perception each in its own 
 peculiar way. Now the sound seems to have come back of itself, 
 now it appears to have been called back. These meanings appear 
 to attach to the percept; they seem to be incorporated into the 
 experience of the moment. But the point to note is this : in the 
 successive pulses of perception the sound consciousness becomes 
 ever vaguer and vaguer, and we are soon off in the land of nod. 
 This we realize only after a well-intentioned neighbor has pinched 
 our arm. 
 
 To return to the hypothetical case, in which the observer is 
 required to fix attention upon one aspect of the sensation and to 
 continue to it. Here we do not alternate, as in the case of staring 
 at the wall, between the more "fundamental" quality aspect 
 and the subtler intensity aspect, but we stick to quality. Have 
 we reason to believe that the content at the focus will behave 
 differently in this case where the controlling factor is a psycho- 
 
62 CARL RAHN 
 
 logical purpose, than when consciousness was under no guidance 
 of a purpose to single out that aspect, but responded as a result of 
 habit to this more "fundamental" aspect? In the class-room 
 experience we note the presence of both these factors that might 
 be instrumental in introducing changes into the temporal course 
 of consciousness. In the case of staring at the wall we had not 
 the purpose of keeping the tint "there". Retrospectively, we 
 note that the color came and went and that each time the "jerk" 
 of its coming appears to have become weaker. There was no 
 "pulling ourselves together" to attend. It is only after the 
 experience that we become aware of the fact that consciousness 
 had narrowed down to so small a perceptual field and that it had 
 arrived at so low an ebb. . . In what way the presence of a pur- 
 pose would color this experience need not detain us here — 
 whether as a vague realization of the situation, or as expressed 
 in voluntary control of the process of accommodation of the sense 
 organ, or in the mere "feel" of the accommodatory adjustment. 
 But if it should be found that when this inner factor is present 
 the sensory process at the focus takes a different course than 
 when it is not involved, then we would once more have in this 
 last instance of observing a single aspect of sensory experience 
 likewise a case in which the attempt to introspect it while it is in 
 progress, introduces changes into the "process" itself. . . 
 
 Now introspectively, we believe, the way of staring blankly at 
 the wall — with the bare awareness of the color quality as the 
 sole "object" at the focus of consciousness — is different in its 
 course, at least, from the experience in which its perception is 
 under the guidance of a purpose. The color consciousness in the 
 first instance might be described, perhaps, as a case of simple 
 apprehension; the pulses of apprehension have a certain quality 
 of their own. The second case, of trying to keep the stimulation 
 in consciousness, has in it all those elements that differentiate 
 "active" from "passive" attention. But in both cases it might 
 be rejoined, it is the context that changes, and not the content at 
 the focus. In our hypothetical case we might have both types of 
 attention present, the content coming in now in such a way that 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 63 
 
 its coming-in has the "feel" of being a function of the stimulus, 
 and now again in such a way that it has the "feel" of being a 
 function of the central factor. But the content itself, some might 
 say, the quality that is perceived, is not altered by it. We would 
 answer that even though this should be shown to be true, the 
 process, the temporal course, the duration aspect, is different 
 under the influence of a purpose from that in the case of a passive 
 awareness of the object. If then these differences between active 
 and passive attention exist, then must we not admit that even 
 here in this case of observation of the behavior off an "attribute" 
 of sensation, the content is influenced by the presence of the 
 psychological purpose to "inspect" the process? The perceptual 
 pulse is no longer that of the coming back in rhythmic flow of a 
 sensory content dependent simply upon the conditions of the 
 stimulation of the nervous elements at the periphery, — but it 
 becomes complicated by those factors that distinguish the course 
 of a process that manifests itself under the conditions of active 
 attention, from that of passive awareness. It is the "process" 
 character of conscious experience that is thereby changed. So 
 long as the psychologist continues to cite duration as one of the 
 "inseparable attributes" of his sensory element, he cannot main- 
 tain that the purpose to observe it introduces no changes into the 
 element. And in order to maintain that it is a "real" item in 
 experience, he believes that he must make duration one of the 
 "inseparable attributes", for, says Titchener, one cannot conceive 
 of a sensation that has not some duration. If such an influence 
 upon the temporal course in the attempt to inspect an "attribute" 
 of sensation takes place, in so far as we regard it as a real 
 occurrence we must conclude that the presence of the psy- 
 chological purpose modifies, here, as elsewhere, the on-going 
 consciousness. 
 
 But to conclude; as against Titchener our analysis has led us 
 to note that no actual conscious process can be "inspected" with- 
 out making the purpose to inspect and the judgment resulting 
 therefrom a part of the activity — and when thus injected into 
 the activity it is side-tracked from its course and the end whither 
 
64 CARL RAHN 
 
 it had been tending. The purpose to introspect, in the sense of 
 "inspect", does verily modify the ongoing process. 
 
 As against Stumpf, we conclude that in so far as the concept 
 of phenomena does not possess as a necessary Merkmal their 
 being in consciousness they cannot be said to "stand over against 
 us". In so far as they are conceived to become at times "con- 
 tents" of consciouness, they cannot be said to stand over against 
 us with all the likenesses and differences that might possibly be 
 noted but go unnoted. They cannot be said to present more 
 meaningful aspects than are actually discriminated. The con- 
 scious experience of a sensory character that occurs in an 
 intensity discrimination cannot be said to be the same as when a 
 qualitative discrimination is made in response to the same inducing 
 stimulation. In the realm of experience as sensory, as in all other 
 realms, enrichment in meaning comes through the discriminative 
 reaction of consciousness. And this is the point of James' con- 
 tention when he maintains that in no sense can the product of 
 analysis, as a conscious somewhat, be said to be already contained 
 in an earlier experience in which no analysis occurred. The 
 physical stimulation as a physical process may be the same, the 
 conduction path to the cortex might possibly be the same, but 
 this is a very different matter from the statement that the 
 conscious experience arising in response to this stimulation is the 
 same. The lights of the city street of Stumpf's illustration, in 
 so far as we become aware of them as phenomenal content, cannot 
 be said to be the "same" under the two conditions of analytic and 
 of marginal attention. In so far as they were marginally noted 
 as merely so many bits of brightnesses in the field of night, they 
 cannot be said to have been phenomenally the same as when 
 under conditions of analytic attention they are noted to 
 differ in hue, some being the yellow of gas lamps, others 
 the blue of electrics. And we are here remaining entirely 
 within the bounds of Stumpf's own sytem, for we are in no 
 wise referring to differences in the "feel" of Funktion, in the 
 two cases, but are restricting ourselves entirely to the phenomenal 
 aspects of the lights. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 65 
 
 XXII 
 
 The psychologist cannot unqualifiedly assert that it is possible 
 to observe conscious processes from a psychological point of view- 
 without thereby interfering with the normal process. To assert 
 that this is possible is to blink the fact of the influence of the 
 central factor, call it whate'er you will, active attention, purpose, 
 Einstellung, determining tendency, or what not. It is rather for 
 psychology to recognize that it is at this very point that it can 
 put in its "licks" in contributing its share to the control of our 
 "inner" world, in the same way as the physical sciences have 
 given us control over the world of things. To realize that the 
 psychological purpose is but one of many possible determining 
 tendencies that might be set into operation in determining the 
 "what" of the "that" in consciousness,* is the beginning of 
 psychological wisdom. The "that," the "object," falls into parts 
 ihat are already habitual ways of conscious reaction. If these 
 fail us, the "that," the stimulus, calls out other, analytic reactions ; 
 it is now scrutinized in the light of the way it affects the sense 
 organs, for we must know "what" the "that" that baffles us, 
 "really" is. Hence the sensory analysis. The meanings that 
 come to us in terms of this analysis are the beginnings of the 
 reconstruction of the object, to use a well known functional 
 phrase, — the object that came to consciousness meaning a baffling 
 "that," in the reconstruction under the influence of past experience 
 becomes a "what," and whatever else it might mean besides, now 
 means at least this much : these, and these, and these, "sensations." 
 It is just because the earlier conscious reactions to the "that" 
 were inadequate, that the analytic reaction is called out, and this 
 is the point at which James's contention might be recalled that 
 the analysis into these and these sensations is anything but 
 "contained" in the earlier reaction to the stimulus. Once the 
 psychologist begins to realize that there is such a thing as psycho- 
 logical analysis and observation going on in the normal business 
 
 * Compare Biihler's distinction between Intention and Wasbestimmtheit, 
 i.e., between "thatnes's" and "whatness"; also Woodworth's distinction twixt 
 sensory qualities and "thinghood." See below, section XXXI. 
 
66 CARL RAHN 
 
 of life, he will set about studying the rise of psychological 
 distinctions as a part of the process of adaptation, he will seek 
 to note just how "observations" of conscious activities changes 
 them, and thus he will get his point of application in the control of 
 mental process. The natural scientist does not merely describe, 
 he seeks to control. The chemist does not merely want to know 
 about chemical elements, he wants to be able to make them do his 
 will, and as a result we have the impressment of chemistry into 
 the service of human ends, just as the physicist's mastery of mat- 
 ter gives to humanity the control of the world in terms of 
 physics. So, too, biology is attempting to develop eugenics as a 
 science. In like manner psychology can render its quota to the 
 control factors in human life by showing up the mechanicism by 
 which changes are introduced into the course, the flow, of con- 
 sciousness. To note that the psychologist can introduce changes 
 in consciousness, can "interfere" with it, is the fact to be 
 "pounced upon", and studied. He should ask how are these 
 changes brought about. A body of knowledge of how to intro- 
 duce these changes is the beginning of a new era in human culture. 
 We instanced above the rise of the habit of dissociating the 
 sensory stimulation from its meaning, the habitual conscious 
 reaction from its stimulus. We noted that the modern mystics 
 are making this the central feature of their method. Now an 
 adequate account of this method, of this psychological process 
 of dissociation for the purpose of allowing new associations to 
 rise, would give us an element of control in our psychic life that 
 would be of value not merely for mysticism, but more broadly for 
 science and the affairs of common life. It would give us the tool 
 by means of which men might literally limber up their minds. . . 
 It is such a body of knowledge, also, that a truly scientific psycho- 
 therapy must make its point of departure. 
 
 We note then that our provisional criterion that we sought to 
 apply to the types of experience designated by various categories 
 in our psychological system, for purposes of classification, fails 
 us. We cannot classify on the basis of conscious states that 
 suffer and those that do not suffer immediate "inspection". We 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 67 
 
 saw that the injection of the psychological purpose into a normal 
 activity inevitably interferes with the on-going process, i.e., 
 differentiates it from an otherwise similar process into the course 
 of which no such psychological purpose is introduced. This 
 means, then, that the "taking of mental notes while the observa- 
 tion is in progress, without interfering with consciousness", is 
 impossible. It means further that Stumpf's characterization of 
 the "phenomena" that "stand over against us as somewhat 
 objective, that seeks merely to be described and acknowledged", 
 does not apply to anything in the way of actual consciousness 
 that we have been able to discover. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 We now come to the question : How have we come by the 
 category of a static mental "element," a somewhat "that stands 
 over against us ?" 
 
 There is an ancient philosophic distinction between "sense" 
 and the "understanding". The senses were supposed to furnish the 
 raw material which the understanding works over into ideas, and 
 these in turn into the concepts that constitute our mental furni- 
 ture. And what is more, we find that there are some among us 
 who believe that this working up is not merely inferred when we 
 find the furniture there in consciousness,' — no, we may also 
 become aware of the very process itself, we can hear the whirring 
 and buzzing of the manufacturing, as it were. The raw material 
 that comes in, is conditionel in large measure by the constitution 
 of the sense organs and by the manner in which they are affected 
 by the things of the outer world. But whatever the metaphysical 
 conception of the status of the in-coming material may be, it is 
 supposed to possess a certain fixity of inner constitution. It is the 
 phenomenal reflex into consciousness at the point where the 
 the individual comes in contact with the "world" in which he 
 lives. It is not the "world" itself that comes in, nor a duplicate 
 copy of it, but that which comes in is an "appearance", phenom- 
 
68 CARL RAHN 
 
 enon. Over against this phenomenal content is the understanding, . 
 Spinoza and Descarte's distinction twixt extension and thinking 
 recurs in Stumpf's categories of phenomena and Funktionen, for 
 "das uns gegebene Tatsachenmaterial zeigt eben schon in der 
 Wurzel ein Doppelantlitz". 55 The philosophic ancestry of the 
 distinction throws some light on certain features of contempor- 
 ary conceptions. 
 
 The modern sensation is in part a descendant of one side of this 
 duality. We shall not here trace the line of descent,* but would 
 point out that it is discernible, for instance, in the statement of the 
 sensation as the sum of all its attributes. To it still adheres much 
 of that relatively fixed character that belongs to the phenomena 
 over against the more labile thought ingredient of consciousness. 
 And in Stumpf 's making the fact of being in consciousness not a 
 necessary Merkmal of the phenomena we see a logically consistent 
 carrying-out of the distinction. The phenomena need not neces- 
 sarily be in consciousness in order to constitute them phenomena. 
 The understanding, in the case of Stumpf's system, one of the 
 psychic Funktionen, notes elements here and others there, i.e., 
 focuses upon them. The phenomena are there, waiting to be 
 acknowledged and described. Hence the doctrine of the possi- 
 bility of unconscious phenomenal contents. 66 The fact of being 
 noted, the fact of coming to the focus, in a word, the fact of 
 clearness, is not, in such a system, an attribute of the phenomena, 
 but of the process of apprehension. The phenomena may remain 
 the same when apprehended marginally as when attended to 
 focally. Relations and likenesses and differences exist between 
 the phenomena that may or may not be apprehended in the opera- 
 tion of the psychic Funktionen. 56 Phenomena and Funktionen 
 are independently variable. The peppermint experience before 
 analysis and the peppermint-analyzed-into-its-elements have the 
 same phenomenal content — what has changed is the Funktion. 
 On the other hand, the Funktion may remain constant whilst the 
 phenomenal content changes, as when, lost in thought, at the 
 twilight hour, I am still aware of my surroundings through the 
 
 * See below, Section XXXIV. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 69 
 
 visual impressions coming in. I give them, presumably, an un- 
 changing degree of marginal attention, i.e., the Funktion remains 
 constant, so, too, the meaning that accrues to the phenomenal 
 content ; but the phenomenal content that is apprehended is chang- 
 ing without my becoming aware of the change. 66 These are 
 examples illustrative of the thesis that phenomena and Funktionen 
 are independently variable. What remains the same and 
 unaffected by these phenomenal differences is the Funktion, in 
 Titchener's terms the "attitude" that we have assumed in 
 response to the stimulation arising from the objects gradually 
 changing under the influence of twilight illumination. It is 
 assumed that certain conscious phenomenal elements are likewise 
 changing, but the "clearness" of apprehension with reference to 
 them, and the manner in which they are apprehended (the "pat- 
 tern" into which they would have to fall as a result of the activity 
 of the Funktion des Zusammenfassens) may remain constant. 
 Such a characterization is possible only in a system in which 
 sensory phenomena with all their "attributes" may exist in con- 
 sciousness without being meaningful. Just bare attributive 
 changes are here supposed to have been going on, presumably 
 within consciousness, and yet called out no meaningful reactions. 
 In the phenomena relations of likeness, of difference, etc., may 
 exist without being noted. There are even unnoticeable differ- 
 ences; 66 and nothing would appear to stand in our way if we 
 would posit, say, sensations that remain below the threshold. 
 Furthermore, "the fine distinctions in the content of the sensa- 
 tions that are ours are not always directly present to us. We must 
 differentiate once more between phenomenon and thing-in-itself 
 within the realm of the phenomena themselves." 67 
 
 So much for this conception of sensory phenomena as over 
 against the understanding. The world of phenomena is not the 
 world of physics, nor yet is its existence dependent upon the 
 presence of the phenomena in consciousness. We study the 
 phenomena under conditions of focalized attention, but the attri- 
 butes that we discern in them and the relations existing between 
 them are in no sense dependent upon consciousness for their 
 
70 CARL RAHN 
 
 existence. Stumpf would make the science of phenomenology 
 a discipline of its own. 69a Phenomena are the starting point for 
 both physical and psychological science, but only the starting 
 point, for the real matter of the sciences lies to either side of 
 the phenomena. The real business of psychology is the study 
 of operations of the Funktionen, and he carries out his con- 
 ception consistently within the limits of his system. At one point 
 an interesting question might arise: Are we to conceive the 
 transition from focally apprehended sensations over into marginal 
 and subliminal sensations as a gradual decrease in clearness of 
 apprehension merely? And if so, would the hypothetical sensa- 
 tions below the threshold have at least physiological representa- 
 tion, — specifically in the same parts of the nervous system as 
 the sensations that have conscious existence, i.e., in the cortex? 
 If subconscious phenomenal representation be denied to stimula- 
 tion that functions in releasing subcortical reflexes, the distinction 
 would appear a trifle arbitrary, for it would rest on purely physio- 
 logical grounds, i.e., the distinction between unconscious cortical 
 paths and subcortical paths. If, on the other hand, the distinction 
 be not drawn somewhere, then all stimulation of the physiological 
 organism might claim sub-liminal representation in the phenom- 
 enal nether-world of the psyche. Thus it would not be an illegiti- 
 mate interpretation of Stumpf s illustration to affirm that the 
 stimulation arising from the presence of the lights of the city 
 streets functioned a large part of the time in releasing purely un- 
 conscious reactions resulting in my keeping to the path as part of 
 the total adaptive process in an accustomed environment. On 
 the first supposition viz., that only cortical stimulation is to have 
 phenomenal representation, whether conscious or unconscious, 
 the lights would at times, under a focal and marginal apprehen- 
 sion, have conscious phenomenal representation, — at times merely 
 sub-liminal representation, in so far as the reactions resulted in 
 the form of unconscious cortical reflexes, and at other times no 
 phenomenal representation at all, whenever the cortical reflex 
 should become short-circuited by way of a thalamic or even some 
 lower correlation center. Yet this is not the interpretation that 
 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 71 
 
 Stumpf would seem to make in his illustration, for he says: 
 "Surely, we must say to ourselves that just a moment ago there 
 also were light and sound impressions of the same sort and in 
 the same spatial and temporal relations as we now perceive them," 
 i.e., under conditions of focalized attention. The reaction of 
 "just a moment ago" may have come under any one of the three 
 neurological possibilities just mentioned, including the case 
 where the stimulation does not release a cortical but a sub-cortical, 
 let us say, a thalamic, reflex. If we are right in this, then stimu- 
 lation functioning in releasing not cortical but sub-cortical reac- 
 tions also might claim sub-liminal phenomenal representation. 
 But the moment we take this position it means that we must allot 
 to all stimulation of the physiological organism, of whatever 
 sort, whether from within or without, phenomenal representation. 
 We would thus obtain a wealth of phenomenal content; but 
 whether any rational need justifies us in affirming that the unap- 
 prehended sensory materials that by hypothesis are to be assumed 
 as the unconscious phenomenal representation of stimulation that 
 functions in releasing automatized sub-cortical reflexes, — whether 
 we are justified in affirming that such hypothetical sensations are 
 "the same" as the sensations of conscious experience, is open to 
 grave doubt. . . 
 
 The phenomena, then, do not exist in consciousness as rela- 
 tively stable "thats" that may be inspected. In so far as they do 
 come to consciousness in the concrete experience they are inex- 
 tricably bound up with the Funktion of apprehension, awareness, 
 or what not, and it is only by logical abstraction that, in the first 
 place, phenomena and the apprehending Funktion may be 
 differentiated, and, in the second place that the phenomenon, 
 say a specific senory experience, can be characterized as a some- 
 what that stands over against us that asks merely to be described 
 and acknowledged. Such a characterization of the phenomena is 
 a result of logical abstraction and it is in no sense true of the 
 actual conscious experience. 
 
 Such being the philosophic antecedents from which springs 
 the present day conception of "sensation", the descendant of that 
 
72 CARL RAHN 
 
 which is "apprehended" by the "understanding", — it is small 
 wonder that we get into difficulties when we try to "attribute" 
 to the sensation some of the characteristics, properties, or what 
 not, that in that ancient distinction had come to be assigned to 
 the other side of the division, as when, for example, we try to 
 make the fact of clearness, the way in which the "understanding" 
 apprehends the "phenomena", an attribute of the phenomena 
 themselves. With the reaction against the "faculty" psychology 
 came the desire to state consciousness in purely phenomenal 
 terms, — to state it "as it is, existentially". The sensations of our 
 day are the phenomena of the ancient distinction, reconstructed 
 to suit an attempt at a purely structural statement of conscious- 
 ness. They seek to cease being the rigid entities that they once 
 had been while still a part of the dual system, and take upon 
 themselves some of the characteristics that in those older systems 
 and in the contemporary systems of Stumpf and others are 
 attributes of the Funktionen. Yet when we are mindful of the 
 origin of the abstraction we can somewhat more readily appre- 
 ciate the difficulties into which we are thus led. Taking up 
 into our definition of sensation the statement that sensations 
 never mean — a function that in the dual system had been ab- 
 stracted from the conscious experience and attributed to the 
 understanding, — and having taken over this Merkmal of being 
 meaningless, and at the same time eliminating from our psycho- 
 logical system that which erstwhile performed this function, we 
 find that our method of procedure works havoc within our psycho- 
 logical conceptions themselves. We call the sensation a "process", 
 hoping thereby to emphasize the fact of change and to eliminate 
 the rigidity of the "phenomena". Yet logically we defined a 
 sensation as the sum of all its attributes, and so long as we retain 
 such a definition, a change in any of these attributes makes the 
 sensation ipso facto another sensation, so that we do not get a 
 sensation that is a process, but a series of sensations that might, 
 perhaps, constitute a process. But it can hardly be said to consti- 
 tute that so long as we retain the definition, given above, and 
 the postulate of sensations as meaningless ; 80 for by the definition 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 73 
 
 each group of "attributes" constitutes an element in itself, and 
 the postulate prevents the consolidation of these into a "process", 
 for to do that would be to establish relation between the various 
 parts of the series, and the introduction of relation would consti- 
 tute meaning. For the various parts, or elements, of the series 
 would be each other's context; and context is that which consti- 
 tutes meaning; 80 hence a process in which changes occur would 
 necessarily be itself a meaning. We have already noted how the 
 attempt to make the fact of clearness an attribute of sensation, 
 leads to other logical incongruities. . . Thus we see that the 
 attempt to give an intelligible account of consciousness in terms of 
 the "phenomena" that, however we may seek to alter the concep- 
 tion, betray all along the line their one-sided origin in that 
 earlier abstract distinction between "sense" and "understanding", 
 - — that such an attempt leads us into hopeless confusion. In its 
 continual insistence that it is a "process" and not a static some- 
 what, the modern sensation reminds us of the words of the Queen 
 in Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." 
 
 On the other hand, the abstraction of the "process" character, 
 of the "active powers", from the "phenomena", leads in other 
 systems to a hypostatization that is equally illegitimate or equally 
 legitimate, as one chooses. Here very soon "act" and the 
 meaning that accrues to a situation by virtue of the act (for the 
 "phenomena" are without meaning), came to be differentiated, 
 and as a result we have not merely Funktionen over against 
 phenomena, but also the meanings that are the "correlates" of the 
 Funktionen. These correlates are the Gebilde in Stumpf's sys- 
 tem. 64 In other systems there are analogous concepts, such as 
 For men, Gestaltsqualitaten, etc. In Stump f they are not con- 
 ceived of as quite so independent of the Funktionen as are the 
 phenomena, but when we turn to Biihler's discussion of Stumpf's 
 system, we find that the conception of the Gebilde has already 
 come to partake more of a content character and is subsumed by 
 Buhler under the category of gedankliche lnhalte, thought con- 
 tents, as over against the Empfindungen and Vorstellungen that 
 constitute the sinnliche lnhalte, sensory contents. 22 And differen- 
 
74 CARL RAHN 
 
 tiation once started, there is no end of new categories : Bewusst- 
 seinslagen, Regelbewusstein, attitudes, Bewusstheiten, — to name 
 but a few. In how far these are Funktionen that are in conscious- 
 ness, yet are chary of being called Inhalte, contents, but never- 
 theless exhibit some leaning in that direction, — there is little 
 unanimity. This chariness on the part of the Funktion to be 
 classed with the Inhalte and its protestation that it is neverthe- 
 less "immediately given" is sufficient earnest to us that it is the 
 counterpart of the activity phase, of the process character, ab- 
 stracted from the totality of conscious occurrence. The mani- 
 fold of new categaries is truly staggering, — and all protesting 
 vehemently that they are "non-senory" or "imageless" or "pure" 
 thought or activity. Scant courtesy is paid the Sensation by those 
 who have transferred their allegiance to the new god, and surely 
 we must take off our hats to the few trusty fighters still defend- 
 ing the altar of the venerable Concept of Sensation, that since 
 Locke and Hume, has been regarded as the liberator of mankind, 
 as the beacon of empirical science, as the "ultimate" of human 
 experience. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 Yet in the minds of some the question may arise whether any- 
 thing is gained by the invocation of new categories to be 
 characterized largely in negative terms as "non-sensory," so long 
 as we are in a state of doubt as to the positive content of the 
 concept : sensory. It is only when we have a more or less definite 
 meaning to attach to "sensory" that we can be sure of what the 
 newly introduced "elements" or other categories are not. In 
 other words, we would begin a definition of the problem by a 
 re-examination of the relation of the concept : sensation, to these 
 other "non-sensory" categories as it comes out in a comparison of 
 several recent writers on the subject. 
 
 We have noted that in the actual experience of everyday life 
 not all aspects of "sensations" are of equal importance, sometimes 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 75 
 
 it is the qualitative aspect, sometimes the intensity character, that 
 looms large; and we further pointed out that the determining 
 factor lay in the situation as a whole. In each specific case it 
 might be a function of instinct, habit, or of purpose. In the words 
 of Angell, "we shall always find that this sensation is determined 
 by the demands made upon the organism by the environmental 
 situation, i.e., that it is functionally determined and that it will 
 vary with each specific situation with which the organism will have 
 to cope. ... It is never a mere sensation in general. It is always 
 this specific sensation produced by certain particular, momentary 
 organic conditions." 5 Even though the stimulus be the same, the 
 actual conscious character of the sensory aspect of experience 
 that arises in response to the stimulus will vary from time to time 
 as the situation or the purpose varies. "One may of course 
 hypostatize this sensation and, dissociating it from its particular 
 surroundings, regard it as a type of a relatively static structural 
 element, for which specific function is a secondary and unimpor- 
 tant consideration. But the actual sensory experience which 
 constitutes the prototype of this hypostatized sensation, is not only 
 capable of being viewed as an expression of functional activities, 
 it cannot be correctly viewed or accurately described in any other 
 way." 
 
 A number of writers dwell upon this point that the actual 
 conscious character of the sensory experience is dependent on 
 the functional activity that is going on at the time being, and 
 that it is not a fixed, staring, stable, static, immutable somewhat. 
 Yet most of them are chary of departing from the venerable 
 dogma concerning the "inseparability of the attributes" ; instance 
 recently: Watt, in The British Journal of Psychology, Volume 
 IV., Part 2, on The Elements of Experience and their Integra- 
 tion; or Modalism, and Aveling, in the same volume, on Relation 
 of Thought-Process and percept. Both emphasize especially the 
 variability in the relative functional importance of the several 
 attributes. That the various "aspects" may vary from time to 
 to time in attentional clearness even Titchener teaches. And 
 Meumann, likewise, writes as follows : "Beachten wir die Inten- 
 
76 CARL RAHN 
 
 sitaten, so treten die Qualitaten, die raumlichen und zeitlichen 
 Verhaltnisse fur unser Bewusstsein zuriick, beachten wir raum- 
 liche Verhaltnisse, so gilt dasselbe von den Qualitaten, Intensitaten 
 und Zeiten. Beachten wir die Zeitverhaltnisse, so treten alle 
 qualitativen, intensitiven, raumlichen Theilinhalte aus dem 
 Blickpunkt des Bewusstseins ; beachte ich Muskelpannungen ihrer 
 Intensitat oder Qualitat nach, so verschwinden relativ fiir mich 
 ihre zeitlichen Verhaltnisse." 40 
 
 But when we turn to Kiilpe, we find that he comes very close 
 to cutting the Gordian knot in affirming the separability of the 
 attributes for "actual consciousness", even though they continue 
 inseparable in some strange nether-world of "psychic reality". 
 
 In connection with an account of certain experiments on 
 abstraction, Kiilpe notes this fact of difference in the sensory 
 aspect of experience in so far as it is a function of the dominating 
 purpose of the moment. 34 In these experiments groups of 
 symbols were presented, the elements of which differed among 
 themselves in form, in color, and in arrangement. Instructions 
 were to focus now upon the number of elements in the group, 
 now upon their arrangement, now upon their form, now upon 
 the colors. Concerning the different ways in which the content 
 was in consciousness under the influence of the various types of 
 instruction or purpose, he says : "Fiir die Erklarung ist zunachst 
 wesentlich, ob die gefundenen Unterschiede . . . auf Unter- 
 schiede der Gesichtsempfindungen order der appercipierenden 
 Faktoren zuriick zu fiihren seien. Werden Z. B. die Element e 
 oder die Farben anders gesehen, wenn entsprechende und wertn 
 heterogene Aufgaben vorliegen, oder werden sie anders aufge- 
 fasst, ohne dass die Gesichtsempfindungen selbst in beiden Fallen 
 einen erheblichen oder wesentlichen Unterschied darboten? 
 Darauf kann, wie ich meine, nach unserem Protokoll und der 
 ganzen Versuchsanordnung nur gesagt werden, dass der Unter- 
 schied lediglich oder doch wenigstens der Hauptsache nach in der 
 Auffassung, nicht aber in den Empfindungen liegen kann. Mag 
 ferner in manchen Fallen ein rasches Vergessen stattgefunden 
 und die Aussagen iiber die der Aufgabe nicht entsprechenden 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 77 
 
 Teilinhalte beeintrachtigt haben, so ist doch zumeist, wie ich auf 
 Grund des Protokolls feststellen kann, die Auffassung selbst 
 unmittelbar eine andere gewesen fur entsprechende und fur 
 heterogene Aufgaben . . . Die Farben erscheinen (in the case 
 of "heterogene Aufgaben", i.e., in problems in which the question 
 of color was irrelevant) tatsachlich nur als gleich oder verschie- 
 den, als dunkel oder bleiben ohne Ortsbestimmung . . . Am 
 starksten zeigt sich die apperzeptive Natur dieser Tatsachen darin, 
 dass Aussagen uber Element e oder Farben uberhaupt, in jeder 
 Richtung unterblieben. Die Versuchsperson ist z. B. im Stande 
 eine Figur richtig zu beschreiben, ohne uber die Beschaffenheit 
 der sie begrenzenden Objekte irgend etwas unmittelbar im Be- 
 wusstsein erlebt zu haben." 
 
 "Ich lege wert darauf zu konstatieren, dass in den Abstrak- 
 tionstatsachen unmittelbare Bewusstseinsphanomene vorliegen. 
 . . . Die Versuchspersonen glaubten tatsachlich die Eindriicke in 
 der angegebenen Unbestimmtheit zu sehen, bezw. tatsachlich 
 keine Farbe, kein Objekt u. s. w. wahrgenommen zu haben. Da 
 nun die Psychologie als Wissenschaft den Empfindungen regel- 
 massig bestimmte Eigenschaften beilegt, sie aus bestimmten 
 Teilinhalten bestehen lasst, so geht daraus hervor, das sie 
 zwischen den psychischen Vorgangen und dem Bewusstsein von 
 ihnen unterscheidet." 
 
 "Dass dieser Unterschied gemacht werden muss, etwa in 
 demselben Sinne, wie man zwischen physischen Vorgangen und 
 dem Bewusstsein von ihnen unterscheidet, dass mit anderen 
 Worten die alte Lehre von einem inneren Sinn mit der dazu 
 gehorigen Gegeniiberstellung von Bewusstseinwirklichkeit und 
 Realitat fur das Gebiet der Psychologie eine zeitgemasse Erneuer- 
 ung finden muss — das ist das prinzipielle Ergebnis, das ich meinen 
 Versuchen entnehmen mochte. In Anschluss daran defmiere ich 
 die Abstraktion als den Prozess, durch den das logisch oder 
 psychologisch Wirksame von dem logisch oder psychologisch 
 Unwirksamen geschieben wird. Die wirksamen Teilinhalte sind 
 fur unser Denken und Vorstellen die positive abstrahierten, die 
 unwirksamen aber diejenigen, von denen abstrahiert worden ist. 
 
78 CARL RAHN 
 
 Fur unser Bewusstsein giebt es demnach abstrakte Vorstellungen, 
 fiir die psychische Realitat giebt es nur konkrete Vorstellungen." 
 We have quoted the section at length because we believe that 
 it contains much that will elucidate the relation between "sensa- 
 tion elements" and the "non-sensory components" of perception 
 and thought, and also much that will bear on the problem of con- 
 tent and function. Let us note first that when the sensory quale 
 is irrelevant to the problem, the subject believes tats'dchlich to 
 have seen no color, or else the various colors appeared merely as 
 being alike or different (ah gleich oder verschieden) , or else have 
 merely a certain brightness value. In other words, Kiilpe believes 
 that after all allowance has been made for possible errors due 
 to memory, there is a very actual abstraction from visual quality 
 in the conscious response to a stimulus under the influence of the 
 Aufgabe in which the purpose is, say the determination of the 
 character or of the arrangement of the elements or units in the 
 presentation. The quality actually does not enter consciousness, 
 yet there may be some awareness of brightness or of sameness 
 or of difference. The subject may be able to "describe accurately 
 a figure or contour, without having had any immediate conscious 
 experience of the attributes (Beschaffenheit) of the delimiting 
 objects". We believe that we are justified in interpreting this as 
 meaning that what comes to consciousness under these specific 
 conditions created by the Aufgabe is something of the nature of 
 Gestaltsqualitdt, and that, while none of the "attributes" of the 
 delimiting and of the delimited fields came to consciousness, the 
 awareness of some difference between the two became the basis 
 for the apprehension of the quality of form ... In the conscious 
 reaction, then, there is an abstraction from irrelevant aspects of 
 sensory experience, that under other conditions, specifically under 
 the influence of another Aufgabe, might have come to conscious- 
 ness. Such abstraction would appear to be all of a piece with 
 those cases of everyday experience in which the intensity of the 
 stimulation appears to come to consciousness abstracted from the 
 specific quality, as when a bright light is suddenly flashed before 
 us on a dark night, — the case on which we dwelt some time ago. 
 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 79 
 
 If this be true, then we believe that we are on the track of the dis- 
 tinction that Kiilpe and others make between B ewusstseinwirkliclv- 
 keit and psychische Realitat. He tells us that the differences in the 
 content that are noted in the different reactions to the stimulus 
 resulting from the change in purpose, are to be characterized not 
 as differences in the sensations, but as differences in our appre- 
 hension of them. For, "since psychology as a science regularly 
 assigns to sensations certain attributes, allows them to be consti- 
 tuted by certain part-contents, it follows that we must distinguish 
 between psychic processes and our consciousness of them". The 
 "psychic processes" in this case are the underlying sensory pro- 
 cesses, and, we take it, these processes, as sensations that are 
 "the sum of all their attributes", are to be postulated as "psychic 
 realities" but not as "conscious actualities" in this series of per- 
 ceptual experiences. We would not impute to Kiilpe a point 
 of view that may be foreign to him, yet it may not be amiss to 
 indicate here a point of contact that he would seem to have in 
 common with functional psychology. He says, "I would define 
 abstraction as the process by which the logically or psychologically 
 efficacious (Wirksame) is separated out from that which is logic- 
 ally or psychologically inefficacious (unwirksame) . The efficacious 
 part-contents are for our thinking and ideating ( Vorstellen) those 
 that have been positively abstracted, the inefficacious those that 
 have been abstracted from. For our consciousness, therefore, 
 there may exist abstract Vorstellungen, for psychic reality there 
 can be only concrete Vorstellungen." Sensations and images as 
 they come to consciousness are here referred to under their aspect 
 of Wirksamkeit, efficacy. It is the function that they are serving 
 that determines their conscious character. Those aspects ( Teilin- 
 halte) come to consciousness that are germane to the solution of 
 the problem. It is the Aufgabe that determines how the objective 
 stimulation is going to be reacted to by consciousness. The 
 inefficacious aspects are abstracted from ; they need not even come 
 to consciousness marginally. 
 
 Sensory experience would certainly appear to be regarded 
 here from the point of view of function. A like significance 
 
8o CARL RAHN 
 
 would seem to attach to the characterization of consciousness 
 as actual, Bewusstseinwirklichkeit, as over against the psychic 
 reality (psychische Realitat) that must be ascribed to the 
 sensations as they are "in reality". The distinction could not 
 have been clothed in these words haphazardly by Kiilpe and there- 
 fore the choice of the word "actuality", Wirklichkeit, is significant 
 on account of its functional import as over against the more 
 static meaning of reality that is ascribed to the "merely" psychical. 
 Here, then, we would at least seem to have common ground with 
 the functionalist so far as we are dealing with "conscious 
 actuality" and not with an abstract "psychic reality". For 
 conscious actuality part-contents (Teilinhalte), i.e., "attributes" 
 of sensory stimulation, may become abstracted under the influence 
 of the demands of the moment, and constitute the "content" of 
 thought and idea. Such content, then, would have its rise as a 
 response to functional demands and Angell speaks to the point 
 when he says that "it cannot be correctly viewed nor accurately 
 described in any other way". It is merely a matter of termin- 
 ology when Kiilpe calls the "part-content" thus functionally 
 effective "abstract" ; in this sense all content of actual conscious- 
 ness might be referred to as "abstract", but this would involve us 
 in the larger question whether all consciousness is essentially 
 selective and we still have to face the problem of the images 
 that have the appearance of mere "by-play" and of "sparks 
 struck off by thought in its progress". 100 Here let us dwell 
 only upon the implication that form or arrangement sensory 
 quale, intensity, quantity, may each be "abstracted", and become 
 the effective content of actual consciousness. Sensory experience 
 in actual consciousness, then, is not a mechanical sequence of 
 sensations as they are described by "psychology as a science", 
 but it is rather a looming up of now this aspect, now that, all in 
 response to needs arising in the on-going activity 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 81 
 
 XXV 
 
 Kiilpe states that the differences in the varying perception of 
 the presentative material, parallel with the variation in the 
 Aafgabe, are not differences in the "sensations" (Empfindungen) 
 but differences in the mode of apprehension (Auffassungsweise). 
 We are here face to face once more with the dual system with 
 its distinction of sense and understanding. The "inner sense" 
 selects, apprehends in some mysterious manner, the "psychic 
 processes" of sensation, and it is only so that they are lifted from 
 the plane of mere "psychic reality" to the level of "conscious 
 actuality". 35 With such a dialectic, to affirm that the "sensa- 
 tions" remain the same, Kiilpe can mean only that the stimula- 
 tion is the same, and such a statement contains no reference what- 
 ever to characteristics of sensations as "contents" of consciousness. 
 The sensation has "psychic reality" ascribed to it; yet it would 
 save a world of misunderstanding if we would treat it frankly 
 as a physiological category. And yet Kiilpe speaks of the concrete 
 Vorstellungen of psychic reality as over against the abstract 
 Vorstellungen of actual consciousness. We would ask: Is it 
 possible for us to experience the concrete Vorstellung, or not? 
 It appears almost futile to discuss this point until we are given 
 further information concerning the character of psychic reality, 
 but it is necessary to appreciate the difficulty, at least, before we 
 can go on to a discussion of "imageless contents". The hypo- 
 thetical psychically real sensory processes that are manipulated 
 in sundry "acts" of consciousness, are evidently regarded in some 
 sense as "given", before they are apprehended by consciousness. 
 Then under the influence of the purpose there is in the process of 
 apprehension abstraction from irrelevant psychic reality. The 
 relevant comes to actual consciousness as the functionally effective 
 content. But nevertheless a part of the constitution of the 
 Vorstellung is conceived as being peculiar to itself and not attri- 
 butable to the action of the apprehending act. Intensity and 
 sensory quality belong to the "sensation" in psychic reality, even 
 though either of these aspects may be abstracted from by actual 
 consciousness. For purposes of statement within a psychological 
 
82 CARL RAHN 
 
 system this statement of psychic realities that are apprehended by 
 an act of consciousness might have some justification, but unless 
 carefully qualified the impression might arise that somehow there 
 are certain "sensations" coming to consciousness and that "parts" 
 of these, Teilinhalte, are then apperceived in an "act" subsequent 
 to their appearance. The ascription of "psychic reality" to these 
 hypothetical sensations and their attributes prior to their appear- 
 ance in consciousness tends to increase the probabilities for the 
 operation of this source of error. One thing to note is this : What- 
 ever the constitution of the hypothetical sensations of merely 
 psychical reality, the sensory experience of actual consciousness 
 is not to be conceived as their copy. We must recall always that 
 these hypothetical sensations are logical constructs and that they 
 are in no sense brute "givens", but are the postulates of "psy- 
 chology as a science". Sensory consciousness may be varied, yet 
 the "sensations" remain the same, so long as the objective stimu- 
 lation and the conditions under which it operates, remain con- 
 stant. "Sensation" and "consciousness of sensation" are two 
 categories that must be carefully kept apart, and it is here that 
 we must locate much of the cause of misunderstanding in the 
 non-sensory imageless thought controversy. 
 
 We note then that the category of sensation for certain 
 psychologists is not a category of consciousness at all. Actual 
 consciousness for such psychologists as Stumpf and Kiilpe is 
 conceived as being essentially functional. "Sensation" is sub- 
 sumed under the category of phenomena, into the conception of 
 which the characteristic of "conscious" does not enter as an 
 essential Merkmal, or else Empfindung is characterized as a 
 "process" of "psychic reality", which, undefined as it is, has the 
 negative differentia, at least, of being put over against "conscious 
 actuality". While there may be eminently good reasons for 
 doing this, it would save much misunderstanding to make it 
 frankly a physiological category; then it would be more easily 
 detected when it got mixed up in explanations in which it 
 masquerades as a conscious somewhat. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 83 
 
 XXVI 
 
 To return now to "conscious actuality" and to the abstract 
 Vorstellungen that are found there. We saw that this conscious 
 actuality as a whole and the abstract Vorstellungen that appear 
 in it as part contents were characterized by Kiilpe in terms indi- 
 cative essentially of functional efficacy. It is in this consciousness 
 that we gain that experience which, under the influence of a 
 psychological purpose, we later systematize and as a part result 
 may obtain the conception of a relative static structural element 
 that we hypostatize as the "sensation" or the "image" of psy- 
 chology. But in the meantime conscious actuality continues to 
 do business with the "abstract" ( ?) shreds of sensory experience 
 and does it in a wonderfully efficient manner. The psychologist, 
 having finally laboriously constructed the "real sensation", 
 comes back to conscious actuality and is dissatisfied with 
 his "element." The element that he has constructed will 
 never do for purposes of describing what goes on in this "con- 
 scious actuality" (Bewusstseinwirklichkeit). Indeed, he becomes 
 convinced that there is "something more" in consciousness that is 
 nothing like the concrete Vorstellung of psychic reality, postulated 
 by psychology as a science. So he thrusts aside his construct, the 
 sensation and image of psychic reality, and proclaims that con- 
 scious actuality is largely "imageless" and "non-sensory". For- 
 sooth, the sensations and images seldom enter this consciousness, 
 and when they do, they are "troublesome", they hinder rather 
 than further thought. Indeed Woodworth notes that they par- 
 take essentially of the nature of "by-play", that they "have more 
 the appearance of sparks struck off by thought in its progress than 
 thought itself". 102 26 Or again, Biihler concludes that "a look 
 into our protocols suffices to say that anything that appears so 
 fragmentarily, so sporadically, so occasionally, in consciousness 
 as the Vorstellungen in the course of our thought experiences, 
 cannot be regarded as the carrier of the closely-knit and continu- 
 ous content of thought". 12 
 
84 CARL RAHN 
 
 XXVII 
 
 And what is it that our psychologist abstracts from experience 
 as the new "element" to put over against the "sensation" ? 
 
 We saw that color quality, according to Kulpe's results, may 
 be abstracted from. "Die Versuchspersonen glaubten . . . 
 
 tatsachlich keine Farbe wahrgenommen zu haben." The 
 
 color qualities do not come to consciousness; "die Farben er- 
 scheinen tatsachlich nur als gleich oder verschieden", or else their 
 white values find representation, they appear merely as dunkel. 
 But the factor that may come to consciousness in these cases is 
 the figure i.e. the form or arrangement. We might conveniently 
 refer to this as the form-quality and point out its kinship with the 
 Gestaltsqualitdt of other writers. It is this form-quality that 
 comes to consciousness here in Kulpe's experiments, as a result 
 of the operation of a certain Aufgabe in response to certain sen- 
 sory stimulations. The form is the "content" of consciousness; 
 it is the abstract Vorstellung which can occur only in conscious 
 actuality, but never in psychic reality, for psychic reality contains 
 only concrete Vorstellungen. 
 
 Now in all these cases of abstraction the differences noted do 
 not lie, for Kulpe, in these Empfindungen. He says : "We must 
 say that the differences can lie solely, or at least in the main, not 
 in the Empfindungen but in the Auffassung (apprehension)." 
 From the making of this distinction we can infer only this : that 
 the Empfindungen in which no change occurs, although character- 
 ized as psychic processes, are nothing other than the peripheral 
 physiological stimulations of the sense organs. In physiological 
 terms it means that very probably under the different modes of 
 apprehension there is no difference in the activities of the end 
 organs, perhaps also in the activity along the conduction paths 
 up to the cortex, though this might turn out to be questionable 
 even as an hypothesis. 110 But the Empfindungen as contributing 
 nothing to these differences are not conscious Empfindungen. 
 They have all the attributes that a structural psychology assigns 
 them, but they are not in consciousness. Consciousness is a new 
 function that supervenes. It is only then that the Empfindungen 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 85 
 
 are precipitated into "conscious actuality". In this dialectic the 
 fact of consciousness, then, is what is meant by the "inner sense". 
 Here we have, once more, the phenomena of Stumpf, and the 
 Funktionen of consciousness over against them. And now in 
 conscious actuality, under the influence of some purpose, those 
 part-contents of psychic reality are abstracted that are relevant to 
 this purpose. And so it comes- to pass that the form-quality may 
 under certain conditions come to consciousness abstracted from 
 the other possible Teilinhalte. This is an abstract Vorstellung of 
 consciousness as functional (Bewusstseinwirklichkeit) , — it is the 
 part-content (Teilinhalt) that is functioning (wirksam) in the 
 problematic situation. I am told to note the form and forthwith 
 the "form quality" is apprehended and all things else are ab- 
 stracted from, i.e. I perceive form or pattern of arrangement in 
 the sensuous presentation. And for Kulpe this actual pattern 
 consciousnes is a product of the process of abstraction ; it is not a 
 function of the Empfindungen. 
 
 For Stumpf this pattern consciousness would be a case of 
 Gebilde, — we believe that we may interpret it as such. If so, the 
 fact of falling into pattern would be characterized as Funktion, 
 the pattern consciousness itself would be the Gebilde. We saw 
 in the course of our earlier discussion that Stumpf held that the 
 Gebilde was not given in the same sense as the phenomena and 
 Funktion were given, but that the Gebilde was characterized as 
 being the "correlate" of the Funktion. It is not a new phenomenal 
 content. Now we saw that Buhler, in a review of Stumpf did a 
 certain violence to Stumpf 's system by classing the Gebilde among 
 the gedankliche Inhalte (thought content) as over against the 
 sinnlichen Inhalten (sensory content). But once only does 
 Stumpf refer to Funktion as content, and we are inclined to 
 believe that that was a slip of the pen. 56 The logical ordering of 
 the categories of his system is this : The immediately givens are 
 (a) contents, viz. : phenomena and relations, and (b) the Funk- 
 tionen. The forms, Gebilde, patterns, are not a third type of 
 given, in the same sense as these other two, but are the "corre- 
 lates" of the Funktionen. What is given need not necessarily be a 
 
86 CARL RAHN 
 
 "content". For that is immediately given that "strikes one as im- 
 mediate matter of fact". The fact of falling into a pattern may be, 
 according to Stumpf , a fact in consciousness, but he would prob- 
 ably have us make it a fact of the "how" of consciousness, not of 
 the "what", of content. The correlate of this "how", the Gebilde, 
 the pattern, is not, says Stumpf explicitly, a new phenomenal 
 content. It is for this reason that we believe Buhler does violence 
 to Stumpf's system in making the Gebilde a "thought content", 
 in spite of the one instance that we mentioned in which Stumpf 
 refers to the Funktionen as Inhalt, thus putting them on a level 
 with the phenomena and the hypostatized sensations of psychic 
 reality. 
 
 It is the form quality, pattern quality, Gestaltsqualitat that 
 comes to consciousness as abstract Vorstelhing in the abstraction 
 tests, that Buhler and Woodworth hypostatize as another form of 
 content. The form quality is referred to by Woodworth as per- 
 cept quality and is the "meaning". 103 And this, as a static 
 somewhat, robbed of its correlation with the Funktion in which it 
 comes into being and abstracted from the total conscious actuality, 
 this "meaning", this way in which objective stimulation is 
 responded to by consciousness in the percept, is ranged alongside 
 of "sensations", Empfiundungen, as another kind of "content" of 
 consciousness. Thus Stumpf's distinction between phenomena 
 and Funktion and Kiilpe's distinction between conscious actuality 
 and psychic reality are overridden. 
 
 We are now in a position to understand more adequately the 
 difference between Stumpf and James upon which we dwelt some 
 pages back: the case of the naive peppermint-experience as over 
 against the experience analyzed into sensations, and the case of 
 the actual lemonade-taste versus the lemonade-taste as being 
 "composed" of sensations of sour and sensations of sweet. The 
 way in which the unanalyzed experience "feels", James holds to 
 be a "simple quality". Stumpf denies this; but the bone of con- 
 tention is not the fact but the psychological naming of the fact. 
 In Stumpf's system the "content" is the phenomenal qualities; 
 in Kiilpe's it is the "processes" of psychic reality. But the 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 87 
 
 consciousness of them as "lemonade" or as "peppermint", i.e. the 
 "form" that they take on in actual consciousness, is the correlate 
 of a Funktion. The Funktion is here the Funktion des Zusam- 
 menjassens, i.e. the abstraction of the psychologist of the fact 
 that under certain conditions a mass of stimulation is thus appre- 
 hended as a unity, which under other conditions might appear as 
 a manifold of sensations. The form is "das, was eine Melodic 
 oder eine rdumliche Figur oder eine sonstige, als zusammen- 
 hdngendes Ganges aufgefasste Vielheit von Erscheinungen unter- 
 scheidet von einer Vielheit sonst gleicher und gleich angeordneter 
 Frscheinungen, die aber vom Bewusstsein nicht zusammenge- 
 fasst werden." 6 * The Funktion, of which the form is the corre- 
 late, is the fact of the occurring, the fact of the cohering; its 
 correlate in each specific case of conscious experience, for Stumpf, 
 is the "form". We believe that logically this is the equivalent of 
 the "percept-quality" of Woodworth, of the Gestaltsqualitdt of 
 Ehrenfels. James' simple quality of perception, then, arises for 
 Stumpf when consciousness reacts upon phenomena in a definite 
 unified way. It has its rise in this reaction of consciousness. It 
 is the correlate of the Funktion. Hence to take this reaction of 
 consciousness and to hypostatize it as a new static element would 
 be logically illegitimate for Stumpf within the limits of his 
 system. The lemonade and the peppermint are in actual con- 
 sciousness what they are experienced to be both for James and for 
 Stumpf, and their difference is not a difference in data, but a 
 difference in working them up into a system. What James 
 affirms is that the sort of consciousness that occurs when I get 
 an analyzed precipitant of "sensations", as they come to con- 
 sciousness as the result of analysis, is in no sense the same as 
 that of the naive unanalyzed conscious reaction. Stumpf's posi- 
 tion might be restated in the form that the sensory stimulation 
 that underlies the naive experience and the analytic reaction is 
 the same. But only that. The reaction of consciousness, how- 
 ever, and, we believe that Stumpf would have to admit, the whole 
 wide-spread activity in the cortex that underlies this reaction, 
 as over against the activity represented by the afferent path up 
 
88 CARL RAHN 
 
 to the cortex that underlies the hypothetical phenomena, these are 
 different in the two cases. 
 
 This case of the lemonade taste, though seemingly so differ- 
 ent, is in principle identical with the case of the abstract Vor- 
 stellung of the form in Kiilpe's experiments and the conscious- 
 ness of the meaning of the spoken words : "Kant's transcendental 
 unity of apperception." All three are alike "sensory", in that 
 their "conscious actuality" is conditioned by some form of periph- 
 eral stimulation. To say that they are "non-sensory" is only to 
 affirm that the hypothetical sensation of structural psychology, 
 which is "the sum of all its attributes", that is abstractly bare 
 sensation without meaning, does not enter into this conscious 
 actuality. In this sense the three may be alike non-sensory. But 
 whatever principle be applied for purposes of classification, all 
 three must come under the same category. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 We then ask: What is the criterion on the basis of which 
 consciousness is to be characterized as "sensory" and "non- 
 sensory" ? 
 
 Buhler speaks definitely to the point in the case of sinnliche 
 Vorstellung. It is one that can be described in terms of sensory 
 quality and intensity, {was durch Angabe von sinnlicher Qnali- 
 tat und Intensitdt beschrieben werden kann.) Now if the "form" 
 of Kiilpe's abstraction tests be the type of the Gestaltsqualit'dt and 
 of the percept-quality, then it cannot be a sinnliche Vorstellung, 
 for it cannot be described directly in terms of visual sensory 
 quality and intensity. "Nothing was immediately experienced 
 consciously concerning the character of the delimiting objects," 
 says Kiilpe. Hence no direct determination of the abstract Vor- 
 stellung in sensory quality or intensity. The Vorstellung in ques- 
 tion, therefore, is not "sinnlich" but " gedanklich" . That is to 
 say, it is to be characterized as non-sensory on the score of the 
 absence of the hypothetical abstract sensations of "psychology as 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 89 
 
 a science", the bare sensation that is a content staring you in the 
 face, as it were, whose "being" consists in its "attributes". 
 
 Yet in the case of visual pattern or form, even if it be a case of 
 abstract Vorstellung, in that there has been an abstraction from 
 sensory quale and presumably from intensity, the question arises : 
 Might not the precipitant in consciousness be characterized as a 
 positive abstraction of the extensity attribute? It is not that we 
 would make a plea for this particular type of procedure, for 
 Kiilpe does not in his paper characterize explicitly this form 
 quality as gedanklich. It is only when we come to Buhler that this 
 occurs. And if the elimination of all the "attributes" is neces- 
 sary before a conscious experience may be designated non-sensory, 
 then we would ask: Why does Buhler leave extensity out of 
 account ? We conclude, therefore, that the only attributes of his 
 "sensory" experience are intensity and quality. 
 
 We have as a result this curious situation: All meaningful 
 consciousness that has as its core intensity or quality phases, easily 
 distinguishable, is to be labelled "sensory". But all those experi- 
 ences that are built upon extensity aspects, such as the pattern or 
 form quality and those that are built upon the order-aspect. — 
 what of these? Are they to be regarded as "non-sensory"? And 
 what of the duration aspect of experience, as in the case of vari- 
 ous types of rhythm ? We point this out only to show that a very 
 fundamental question has still to be faced. If we continue to 
 employ the category of sensation in any form; if arrangement 
 and pattern be in any way referable to extensity and duration 
 aspects of stimulation; and if it be true that in actual conscious- 
 ness there is possible this abstraction of all these various phases, 
 then, since extensity and duration are usually cited as "attri- 
 butes" of sensation, it behooves us not to pass them over without 
 mention. It may be, to be sure, that Buhler would still character- 
 ize these as sensory as Kiilpe appears to do, viz. as abstract 
 Vorstellnngen of conscious actuality. But then Buhler should 
 have named these attributes among the criteria of the sensory. 
 Else he will obtain a curious crossing within his categories, and 
 he can hardly expect the uninitiated to keep them straight. But 
 
90 CARL RAHN 
 
 having stated his criterion of the "sensory" in terms of the two 
 aspects of quality and intensity, he thus makes possible the char- 
 acterization of all meanings, whether perceptual or ideational, in 
 which the important factor is order, either temporal or spatial, as 
 "non-sensory". 
 
 XXIX 
 
 Having thus stated his criterion Buhler does not hesitate to 
 characterize anything in the way of consciousness that might 
 come anywhere near being describable in terms of sensory quality 
 or intensity, as irrelevant. I refer to that aspect of perceptual 
 and ideational experience which even in the absence of the pur- 
 pose to introspect often comes to us in the form of kinaesthesis 
 or kinaesthetic imagery. It is to this aspect of consciousness, 
 we believe, that a curious quality of "humanness" is attributable 
 that seems to belong to the conscious world of the possessors of 
 this type of mental reaction, as over against the more "external" 
 world of other types of mind. He says: "Man konnte ja audi 
 versucht sein, jene sinnlichen Elemente, die wir kurz als raum- 
 liches Richtungsbewusstsein oder Bewusstsein der Anderung 
 dieser Richtungen bezeichnet haben, mit in die Fragestellung 
 hineinzunehmen. Doch ist leicht zu sehen, dass die raumliche 
 Orientierung, welche die Gedanken hier und da zu haben scheinen, 
 etwas so Variables und auch verhaltnismassig Seltnenes ist, dass 
 wir sie trotz des hohen Interesses, das ihr an sich zukommen 
 mag, hier ruhig beiseite lassen konnen. Auch wenn mir bei 
 einen Erlebnisfortschritt, den man durch die Worte 'aber' oder 
 'oder' oder 'trotzdem' kundgeben wiirde, zumute ist, als ginge 
 ich damit von etwas, was rechts vor mir stent, zu etwas, was sich 
 links befindet, oder von etwas vor mir zu etwas hinter mir uber, 
 so kann man diese Erfahrung doch nicht ernstlich zu dem Satz 
 verallgemeinern wollen, das reale Bewusstseinscorrelat jener 
 ideellen Kontinuitaten sei in solchen sinnlichen Elementen zu 
 suchen. Dazu sind sie viel zu zufallig und wandelbar." 11 And 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 91 
 
 this statement is not made in reference to our consciousness of 
 percept quality, but in connection with a more general statement 
 of the relation of this factor to his more elaborate "thoughts", 
 where he is asking : "What are the essential constituents of our 
 thought experiences, i.e., what are the carriers of the thought 
 content : what is the psychically real correlate of the thought that 
 is determined by logic?" 10 Now this kinaesthesis both in sensory 
 form and as imagery that lies at bottom of this form of conscious- 
 ness, comes perhaps as near as any to forcing itself home upon 
 us in the course of normal consciousness, in the form of "mere 
 sensation", not meaningless, to be sure, as the hypothetical sensa- 
 tion and image ought to be according to the definition of struc- 
 tural psychology, but nevertheless often loosed momentarily from 
 the total perceptual or ideational consciousness in which it was 
 apparently functioning, and flashes for a wee space as a dis- 
 tinguishable percept, a kinaesthetic "sensation". Now, this comes, 
 as close as anything to being a "sensation" in actual conscious- 
 ness, a "sensation" which normally appears, if even there, only 
 in introspective or analytic consciousness. It lies fully as close to 
 the surface in some types of mind as does commonly the "sen- 
 sation" of smell in the percept of the rose. Yet Buhler eliminates 
 this aspect as "too fortuitous and changeful". 10 He concludes 
 that the more immediately felt consciousness of seeming to go 
 from something at my right to something at my left, etc., in 
 connection with our awarenes of certain relational words, and 
 which in many minds is given in terms of vivid kinaesthesis or 
 kinaesthetic imagery, is to be abstracted from. In doing this he 
 is inconsistent. His problem was ostensibly to discover the 
 carriers of the Denkgehalt, "how the function of carrying this 
 Denkgehalt is distributed between the Vorstellungen (Vorstell- 
 itngen to be defined as above: sinnliche Vorstellungen) and the 
 Gedanken, and how these two are related to one another." 10 
 But he forthwith eliminates a great part of sensory experience 
 that may have participated in the actual thought consciousness. 
 At least he does away with the sensory aspect, yet in so far as 
 even such sensory content has been in any way meaningful he 
 
92 CARL RAHN 
 
 would divorce the meaning and make it a special sort of content, 
 not of sensing or of imaging, but of "knowing" (eine Bedeutung 
 kann man uberhaupt nicht vorstellen, sondern nur wissen). 21 
 With this statement all common ground is swept from under us. 
 The sensory or imaginal response of consciousness is conceived as 
 a bare, meaningless, static what, so that even in those cases of 
 awareness of pattern or form which might have been abstracted 
 from the qualitative and intensive aspects of presentation in 
 Kiilpe's tests, we would not have anything that as "sensory" is 
 already meaningful, but something to which a new "element" 
 must be added to make it meaningful. And yet, can it be that 
 the pattern aspect referred to is conceived of as different from 
 the Gestaltsqualitat which is mentioned by Biihler? In speaking 
 of it he cites an example. "As I look upon the mass of lines of 
 some complicated mathematical figure, at first blush I am at a 
 loss what to do with it, but suddenly something 'lights up' with 
 regards to them. What is it that has thus 'lighted up'? Evi- 
 dently the meaning of the figure; and this meaning is always 
 something gedankliches, in many cases nothing other than its 
 law of construction." "A similar thing occurs when I suddenly 
 comprehend the construction of a machine or the plan of a 
 building." 15 
 
 We believe, therefore, that experiences such as those of the 
 abstraction tests of Ktilpe and Buhler's examples of Gestaltsquali- 
 tat are essentially the same in kind. "Sensation" would appear 
 to have but little function in Buhler's system ; sometimes it may be 
 the 'substrate" of conscious experience; most often, however, it 
 would appear to be quite irrelevant. 
 
 XXX 
 
 But what may be the relation of his Empfindung and Vor- 
 stellung to his Gedankenf What Biihler characterizes as 
 Gedanken are not the Bewusstseinslagen of Marbe, or the Funk- 
 tionen of Stumpf, or the attitudes of Judd and of Titchener. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 93 
 
 No, while recognizing this category, Biihler insists that it is some- 
 what quite other, viz. : the Bewusstheiten of Ach, which he, Biih- 
 ler would rather term Gedanken. They are the gedankliche In- 
 halte, thought content, as over against the sinnliche Inhalte, 
 sensory content. We saw that he made his sensory content the 
 counterpart of Stumpf 's phenomena, and his thought content the 
 counterpart of Stumpf's Gebilde. And we already noted that in 
 doing this latter he does a certain violence to Stumpf's system 
 — for Stumpf definitely states that his Gebilde, "forms", were 
 not to be considered as content, but as "correlates" of his 
 Funktionen. 
 
 Be that as it may, Biihler notes three types of Gedanken, ( I ) 
 the Regelbewusstsein, 1 * consciousness of rule, of pattern, of 
 construction, (2) Beziehungsbewusstsein, 11 consciousness of rela- 
 tion, and (3) Intention, which we can best render, perhaps, by 
 the term "objective reference". 18 Biihler's content categories 
 might be tabulated thus : 
 
 CONTENT 
 
 a. b. 
 
 Sinnlich Gedanklich 
 
 1. Empfiundung (sensation) 1. Regelbewusstsein 
 
 2. Vorstellung (image) 2. Beziehungsbewusstsein 
 
 3. Intention 
 But when we turn to the end of Biihler's section on Gedanken- 
 typen, we come across another classification of content in terms 
 of W asbestimmtheiten and Intentionen. Every content possesses 
 a "what" and a "that", and his types therefore would appear now 
 to have ceased to be independent elements and to have become 
 "moments", aspects of thought. Every content must have a 
 what and a that. 20 The what may be sensory or imaginal, or a 
 Regelbewusstsein or a relational consciousness ; the that is always 
 reference to an object, whether real or ideal. Aside from the 
 consciousness of Funktion (Stumpf) or of attitude (Judd and 
 Titchener), which Biihler would appear to subsume under the 
 category of Bewusstseinslage, we would now have the following 
 content categories : 
 
94 CARL RAHN 
 
 a. Wasbestimmtheiten (whatness) 
 
 i. Sensations and images 
 
 2. Regelbewusstsein 
 
 3. Consciousness of relation 
 
 b. Intention (objective reference or thatness) 
 
 We note then that the "sensation" and "image", when present, 
 may function as one of the "whatnesses" of the thought. In 
 this sense it is made co-ordinate with meaning and relational 
 elements. Thus in the suddenly up-looming meaning of a plan or 
 of a machine, that Buhler mentions, 15 or in the staircase figure of 
 Woodwoirth, 100 we have such an instance. In so far as we are 
 aware of the whiteness of the paper and the blackness of the 
 lines we have "sensations" as Wasbestimmung, i.e. functioning in 
 determining in part at least, the "what" of the "content". In 
 so far as the whole has the meaning that suddenly looms up, the 
 meaning of a particular plan, or in Woodworm's example, the 
 the one or other staircase meaning, we would have Gedankliches, 
 Gestaltsqualitdt or Regelbewusstsein, or with Wood worth : 
 percept-quality. In so far as it was an object, a thing, a unified 
 something, it would have in it for Woodworth, thing-quality, 104 
 for Buhler, Intention, i. e. objective reference of some sort. 18 
 
 XXXI 
 
 It is this last "non-sensory" aspect of the experience of per- 
 ceiving the plan, the staircase figure, or what not — that is of 
 special interest to us. Here we are face to face with the problem 
 of the thingliness of things of the philosophers, — the problem 
 that Titchener would have us abstract from as non-psychological. 
 Yet there are others who have the temerity to face it. The 
 problem has been with us throughout the modern period of phi- 
 losophy. In Locke it is brought in as the "idea of substance" 
 which must be added to the sense impression to constitute the 
 "thing". Yet how does he get it into his system, since as he says 
 it is derived neither from sensation nor reflection? 36 And in 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 95 
 
 Hume, 28 again, we have a resolute denial of aught but "quali- 
 ties", yet somewhere there is slipped in unawares a "gentle 
 force" that binds them together. Coming nearer home, we note 
 how not only Biihler 19 posits objective reference as a non- 
 sensory component of consciousness, but likewise Woodworth, 105 
 attributing a non-sensory quality, "thing-quality", thinghood, or 
 what not, to his perceptual experience, when he says: "The at- 
 tempt to describe percept qualities as syntheses of sensory qualities 
 is hypothetical in the second degree. The presence of the required 
 images is hypothetical, and no less hypothetical is the power of 
 the images, if present, by combining with the sensation to pro- 
 duce a percept. They might fuse, no doubt ! But is the feeling- 
 together of clanging noise and visual picture fully equivalent to 
 the perception of a ringing car-bell? Were the two not felt as 
 attributes of one thing, their mere simultaneous presence in con- 
 sciousness would not give the percept which is actually experi- 
 enced." The efficacy of the "gentle force" of Hume is doubted 
 by Woodworth and is replaced by a special element of "thing- 
 hood" that must knit together the visual and auditory elements 
 of the experience into a unified whole. 
 
 T. V. Moore 41 in his study on abstraction defines perception 
 as "a process of assimilating the data of sense experience to their 
 appropriate mental categories". It is these mental categories that 
 are the counterpart of the non-sensory components of other 
 writers. Among these categories we find that of "something". 
 Theoretically this is believed by him to be the first category devel- 
 oping in the individual mind and it "enters, though not con- 
 sciously and explicitly, into all his (the child's) later concepts". 42 * 
 
 Turning to another contemporary writer, Schultze, we have 
 a procedure similar to that of Woodworth. He posits a non- 
 sensory component: the Scheinsubstanz, pseudo-substance, which 
 gives to the experience the object meaning. His illustration is 
 fascinating: "While enjoying the spectacle of the play of in- 
 numerable glow-worms in the north of Italy on a warm summer 
 evening in the month of June, one often has the illusion of an 
 unusually swift flying and fluttering on the part of the tiny 
 
96 CARL RAHN 
 
 creatures. Now there is a glow here, now there . . . The illusion 
 arises in that one notes the contemporaneous glowing of many 
 worms at consecutive moments of time, but interprets it as the 
 movement of one and the same creature . . . The illusion is 
 conditioned — speaking psychologically' — in that several light sen- 
 sations are unjustifiedly correlated with one and the same pseudo- 
 substance." 46 Here we have a process of unification posited as a 
 function of a non-sensory component as in the case of Wood- 
 worth's example. But let us note : Schultze speaks in the follow- 
 ing paragraph of this perceptual process as being explicable only 
 by means of a conceptual process occurring without being noticed 
 and immediately thereafter he says that "it is probable that thus 
 also the processes of syntactic correlation will prove to be highly 
 complex, but fully automatized, conceptual processes". 
 
 In connection with these citations let us cite also a passage of 
 Stumpf where he, too, appears to touch upon this problem. In a 
 foot-note he defines his Funktion of awareness as that Funktion 
 through which parts or relations are precipitated out of the chaos 
 of phenomena. 57 Thereupon he says : "To be sure, there usually 
 goes with it an instinctive positing of the part noted, and later 
 there is often also a conceptual judgment concerning the presence 
 of the part or of the relation." It is hardly fair to seek to inter- 
 pret a position on so slight indications as may be found in a foot- 
 note. Yet even a foot-note must mean something and indicate 
 some direction of thought. We ask : What may be the signifi- 
 cance of this "instinctive positing", instinktives Setzen, in this 
 connection? Is it through this instinctive positing that the part- 
 content, the phenomena noted, come to "stand over against us" ? 
 If so, then is there not, even in the phenomena something of the 
 nature of an instinctive Funktion tucked away? And what is to 
 be the meaning that we are to attach to the term instinctive? If 
 instinctive, then it is essentially innate, but innate what ? Is it an 
 innate tendency to action ? — We see that we are here coming into 
 close quarters with certain "genetic" considerations that Stumpf 
 so decidedly deprecates; yet by postulating this instinctive act, 
 which later may be replaced or accompanied by a conceptual 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 97 
 
 judgment, he has certainly touched upon the problem of the rela- 
 tion of instinctive activity to conscious activity, and thus comes 
 well within the domain of the biological aspects of consciousness. 
 
 We have then, here, five contemporary writers who touch upon 
 the problem of objectivity, of the thingliness of things, Locke's 
 problem of the idea of substance "which we neither have nor can 
 have by sensation or reflection", yet concerning which he is con- 
 strained to note that we "accustom ourselves to suppose some 
 substratum wherein they (the simple ideas of sense) do subsist, 
 from which they do result, which therefore we call substance". 39 
 On the other hand we have Titchener who would deny that this 
 is a problem for psychology at all. 95 
 
 The function that is singled out by all these writers, however, 
 is obvious enough. We awake from sleep in response to a sudden 
 stimulus with a "what's that" ! The psychological problem is : 
 How is the "that" given us ? Not in terms always of the "quali- 
 ties" of the stimulus, for we may have in the situation a vivid 
 "that-consciousness", these writers might say, long before the 
 "whatness" of the "that" has been determined in the coming to 
 consciousness of certain attributive aspects giving meaning to 
 the stimulus. We "know" that "something was there", but it 
 may take some time before the stimulation comes to consciousness 
 in terms of certain sensory "attributes", or some other meaning. 
 It is the "something" of Moore, the "pseudo-substance" of 
 Schultze, the Intention of Buhler, the "thing" of Woodworth. 
 All of these writers make the thatness a new structural category. 
 But what would Stumpf do with our instance? Would the 
 "instinctive positing" be precipitated into consciousness before 
 the phenomena in terms of which the stimulus would be character- 
 ized, have themselves loomed up? And would this precipitating 
 of an instinctive activity into consciousness then partake essen- 
 tially of the nature of a "conceptual judgment concerning the 
 presence" of some stimulus? 57 And would it be essentially in 
 situations like that of our illustration that the instinctive positing, 
 the thatness, would come to consciousness? Questions such as 
 these bring us within close range of the functional doctrine of 
 
98 CARL RAHN 
 
 perception. The "thatness is a function of the co-operation of 
 many organic conditions. This functioning factor might be a 
 typical attitude of the organism, as in the instinctive attention 
 response. The consciousness that arises in this situation then is 
 that of attentive straining after a "that". 
 
 Here lies the significance of such characterizations as that given 
 by Colvin: "An object is, in the last analysis, constituted by a 
 set of definite and consistent reactions." 24 "Thatness" in the 
 case of the percept, would be referable to the influence of the 
 "instinctive" innate reaction characteristic of responses to external 
 stimulation. This factor in the total overt response becomes the 
 basis for the attitude that contributes toward the awareness of 
 the total situation as a reaction to an object present to sense. 
 
 While one can readily appreciate the dislike that certain psy- 
 chologists express for the indiscriminate intermingling of con- 
 scious functions and motor functions, their legitimate desire 
 to keep conceptual categories nicely apart should not lead 
 them to overlook the fact that motor functions and conscious 
 functions are closely interrelated. A stimulus that is making for 
 expression in terms of one of several habits, insofar as it comes 
 to consciousness at all, is experienced differently than when it 
 calls out another habitual response. So, too, more narrowly, on 
 the side of attitudes, the perceptual attitude may be felt as being 
 distinctly different from the ideational. If then the thatness of 
 the mental object be a function of the instinctive attitude with 
 which the organism responds to the stimulation, it would appear 
 that the standing over against us that, according to Stumpf, is 
 manifested by the phenomena, is not a characteristic that is inher- 
 ent in them, and that is, as it were, written across their face, 
 but rather one that accrues to the sensory experience in the calling 
 out of a certain attitude. The same would hold of the "imaginal" 
 aspect of experience. Analytically sensations and images are 
 not bare, simple, ultimate "thats" in their own right, but rather 
 does their "thatness" — whatever may be the case with their 
 "whatness" — arise as a result of the calling out of a definite 
 type of functional response, originally instinctive, as Stumpf 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 99 
 
 supposes, but later singled out by consciousness and at times, 
 under certain conditions, as in the experience of correcting illu- 
 sions and hallucinations, playing a part in conscious activity and 
 control. 
 
 The Intention of Buhler, the thing-quality of Woodworth, the 
 pseudo-substance of Schultze, the "something" of Moore, — all 
 these, then, may become distinguishable aspects of experience, 
 accruing to experience through the functioning of certain definite 
 attitudes. On the side of overt motor attitudes we have genetic- 
 ally the instinctive attention response, later develop the differen- 
 tiated attitudes which might be referred to as the perceptual, the 
 imaginal, the conceptual, yes, the interrogative even. The 
 psychical "correlates" of these are the different feelings of 
 "thatness", the "reality" of the object of perception, the "ideality" 
 of the object "merely thought of." The peculiar form of object- 
 ivity, of thatness, which accrues to a "content", depends upon 
 which one of these attitudes is functioning at the time. It may 
 eventually be found that certain forms of mental malady are to 
 be referred to the abnormal functioning of some of these atti- 
 tudes ; that folie de dout, for instance, is to be characterized as the 
 tendency of a particular one of these attitudes to be set off under 
 conditions in which in normal persons other responses are habit- 
 ually called out; furthermore, that the degree of suggestibility 
 may depend upon the facility with which one of these attitudes 
 may be replaced by another. 
 
 Here we would appear to have the Funktion of Stumpf, the 
 attitudes of Judd and Titchener functioning in such a way as to 
 bring about a definite type of modification of consciousness, — 
 these modifications being the different modes of thatness that 
 arise in experience. We might be reminded in this connection of 
 Stout's modes of being conscious of an object, 47 of Brentono, 7 and 
 of Colvin's doctrine of attitudes as indicated in his book on The 
 Learning Process. 2 * 
 
 And now, what shall we do with these attitudes? Shall we 
 follow Titchener and Colvin in their method of dealing with them, 
 i.e., analyze them into "sensations", or shall we follow Stumpf in 
 
ioo CARL RAHN 
 
 denying that the Funktion can thus be stated adequately in terms 
 of sensory ultimates. Or shall we go a little farther in another 
 direction with Buhler, Ogden, Woodworth, Schultze, and others, 
 and proceed to hypostatize the objectivity, thingliness, Intention, 
 that accrue to experience as a result of the functioning of these 
 various attitudes, and make of them structural elements? 
 
 Let us revert for a moment to Stumpf's position. While the 
 Funktion was for him "immediately given" it was, nevertheless, 
 not a content category like his phenomena. And its correlate, the 
 Gebilde, likewise was not a new content. Now if the "concep- 
 tual judgment" concerning the "presence or existence of the part 
 noted", of which Stumpf speaks, be the correlate of a Funktion, 
 then it is not to be conceived of, in terms of Stumpf's system, as 
 a new content but as a Gebilde.. And furthermore, if we are 
 justified in interpreting the instinctive positing of which Stumpf 
 speaks, as the primitive unconscious Funktion that is genetically 
 basic to the overt conscious judgment, then the "thatness" aris- 
 ing in unreflective experience, the unquestioning acceptance of 
 the reality of the "presentation", insofar as it constitutes this 
 presentation a "that" which stands over against us, also cannot 
 be conceived of as a new "content". Thus the various modes of 
 objectivity would not be, for Stumpf, new structural categories of 
 static ultimates. If we have been at all successful in our identifica- 
 tion of the Funktion of Stumpf with the "attitude" of certain 
 American psychologists, then we believe, that at least in this he is to 
 be identified more narrowly with the American functionalists in 
 that he does not favor the hypostization of certain modifications 
 accruing to consciousness as a result of the operation of the 
 Funktionen. And, we believe that the various modes of objective 
 reference will eventually be traced back to the functioning of 
 certain typical attitudes or Funktionen. To hypostatize these 
 "feelings" of thingliness, of objectivity, as independent struc- 
 tural "non-sensory elements", will result in the end in a psy- 
 chology as disjointed as the structural sensationalism which those 
 who proceed thus are seeking to overcome. To add another 
 structural element to already existing structural elements does not 
 overcome the difficulty. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 101 
 
 XXXII 
 
 It appears, then, that the "sensation" stands over against us, 
 can be "inspected", because in a complex activity it has been 
 placed over against us, — our attitude constitutes it an object. Yet 
 here lies a subtle difficulty that arises in connection with Locke's 
 problem. For the normal perceptual consciousness the "qualities" 
 and the "objectivity" are given in a unity. There is no question 
 of "is it or is it not an object?" in the thousand and one per- 
 ceptual experiences of the day. It is only on rare occasions that 
 the mind distinguishes twixt "qualities" and "thingliness." The 
 various modes of objectivity, perceptual, imaginal, etc., need but 
 seldom be abstracted and reflected upon, unless, for experimental 
 purposes, or mayhap when we have become subjects in need of a 
 psychotherapist. Yet, nevertheless, in the normal human indi- 
 vidual they do eventually come to be distinguished, and the 
 psychologist may ultimately discover the machinery of the overt 
 judgment mentioned by Stumpf, getting his lead from such 
 experiences as that in which we wittingly "try on" various atti- 
 tudes in concrete situations where conditions are such as to favor 
 ambiguity. Locke, however, did not follow this trail else he 
 would have come upon the attitudes or Funktionen underlying 
 the various forms of objectivity. He chose to follow another and 
 thus came to postulate, as does Buhler after him, an "idea of 
 substance" that is derived neither from sensation nor reflection. 
 His method appears to have grown out of another mode of 
 pre-scientific procedure which we have already had occasion to 
 mention in another connection, viz., the method by which not the 
 attitude is abstracted, but the type of objectivity that is experi- 
 enced through the functioning of various attitudes. In other 
 words he abstracted not the Funktion, but the "correlate" of it 
 which in Buhler's scheme becomes pure thought : Intention. The 
 method is that of the child that delights in staring fixedly as some 
 word upon the page in order to get the strangely mystical experi- 
 ence of "losing" its meaning ; then singling out a letter and losing 
 its meaning, and after some time spent in losing meaning after 
 
102 CARL RAHN 
 
 meaning, he finally emerges once more to take up his normal 
 activities, yet feeling the awe of the little mystic who says : 
 
 "I know something more 
 
 Than just a moment ago, 
 I know something more — 
 
 I wonder what I know?" 
 
 Our thought psychologist believes that he, too, "knows some- 
 thing more", viz: that "thatness", "objectivity", the feeling of 
 "something", may continue to be "given" even after all the sensory 
 "qualities" have been abstracted from the "object". These quali- 
 ties, he finds, may change, yet the object may remain the same. 
 Having abstracted from all the sensory qualities he finds that 
 the "thatness" persists. He now attempts to account for this 
 "thatness", and finds that since he believes that all that is "given" 
 him is the qualities, he must assume a "substance" in which they 
 inhere in order to constitute them a "thing". Hence Locke's 
 "vague idea" of substance, gotten neither through sensation nor 
 reflection, his only sources of knowledge. From the point of view 
 gradually developing in contemporary psychology Locke is per- 
 haps building better than he knows when he attributes this vague 
 idea to "custom". We need not accept the implication that genet- 
 ically there are first the "qualities" and then the gradual develop- 
 ment of the "objects" through "custom" ; but say, rather, that the 
 thingliness is the function of the instinctive attitude that the 
 biological form assumes with reference to the stimulus. Thus 
 the "custom" in question becomes not an individual but a racial 
 habit.* 
 
 But having succeeded in abstracting the "qualities" from the 
 "that", we must not commit the error that James repeatedly 
 warns us against of assuming that the original unanalyzed ex- 
 perience is the sum of these two hypostatized abstractions : The 
 one "sensory", the other "non-sensory" or pure thought. Buhler 
 and the other thought psychologists who make the Intention a 
 
 * Our Lockeian, however, might balk at this point, for fear lest he come 
 dangerously near the bugaboo of "innate ideas." 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 103 
 
 static non-sensory element are using a method of procedure 
 identical with that of Locke. With such a procedure the "quali- 
 ties", the simple "ideas of sensation", acquire a thatness of their 
 own as sensations, and this thatness is other than that of the 
 unanalyzed experience of normal perception. The "qualities" are 
 some of the meanings that may be successively shelled off from 
 the Ding-an-sich. In making the sensations elements they retain 
 this conceptual thatness of quality and only so can they be 
 characterized as "standing over against us" with a thatness of 
 their own, yet independent of the thatness of the substrate in 
 which they are supposed to inhere.' — We have here a suggestion 
 toward a statement in psychological terms of the problem : How 
 does the mind know its object; which psychological statement 
 might possibly be found to point the way toward a workable 
 metaphysical statement. 
 
 Buhler and others are quite consistent in carrying out the 
 Lockeian analysis to its logical conclusion. If our aim is to 
 analyze the percept into its "elements", and we are satisfied to 
 make of the qualities sensory elements, then it is only just to 
 make the "vague idea of substance" another element. Yet in 
 proceeding thus the "sensationalist" and those who find the 
 "imageless thought" are alike following the method that, whether 
 it be admitted or not, grows out of a conception of consciousness 
 as an entity of which the "sensations" constitute a part. Having 
 conceptually created the sensation entities, we question the 
 "power" of the "sensations" to fuse and to constitute an object. 105 
 But to proceed forthwith to create another sort of entity that is 
 to fuse them, as Woodworth does, for instance, leaves us still 
 with a disjointed experience. The difficulty is that the "mere 
 sensation" is for them an entity already, but not the same entity 
 as the colored sounding hard object that compels our attention. 
 But to create another non-sensory "thatness" gives us not the 
 fused, unified, mental experience of normal perception, but the 
 state of mind of the philosopher, facing the problem of the 
 relation of the "qualities" to the Ding-an-sich. 
 
 It would appear, therefore, that Buhler' s Intention is, as he 
 
IQ4 CARL RAHN 
 
 claims, truly a distinguishable characteristic of every actual con- 
 scious experience. We saw that the type of Intention, of thatness, 
 may be very various indeed. But if it should be found that the 
 whole of conscious life always divulges this "ever-present" aspect 
 of objective reference, for which Brentano 8 contended nearly 
 forty years ago, then Biihler is doing contemporary psychology 
 good service in insisting that investigation be directed upon it. 
 Granting this universality for the nonce, with what current con- 
 cepts of psychology will it be found to have elements in common ? 
 Are we lead to correlate the "thatnesses" with the focus or foci of 
 consciousness? Does the focusing constitute objectivity? Are 
 the various "thats" felt as different by reason of the functioning of 
 different attitudes within the total activity? In how far are 
 these different "feels" of thatness, which we are now discovering, 
 comparable with the "modes of being conscious of an object" of 
 Stout? 
 
 Chiefest of all the service that has been rendered us by the 
 "thought psychologists", among whom Biihler, beyond a doubt, 
 has been the most active and heroic, is this : It forces us to face 
 the question as to what constitutes our concept of sensation and 
 its relation to the other psychological categories. Not the question 
 of the presence of "non-sensory elements" is first to be decided, 
 but rather must the psychologist first consider the question of the 
 meaning of "sensory" and of "element". 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 If the "thatness" of the sensation accrues to it by reason of the 
 functioning of a specific attitude, Funktion, or Bewusstseinslage, 
 then it must be stated not as a peculiarly inherent characteristic 
 but as one that is derived. And what about the other "attributes", 
 — are they inseparable, ever-present aspects of an ultimate, 
 "given" sensation element? 
 
 We have cited those who would demur at the rigidity of the 
 interpretation of the concept that, as was pointed out, continues 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 105 
 
 to bear the marks of its origin in connection with a conception 
 of the nature of mind that makes sensation a relatively static, 
 "meaningless" factor in experience. We have cited Kiilpe as 
 proclaiming the possibility of abstract Vorstellungen in "actual 
 consciousness", and relegating the sensation of the inseparable 
 attributes to a nether-world of "psychic reality". A suspicion is 
 arising whether sensation is to be adequately stated in terms of 
 the old definition. May it not be that the sensory attributes may 
 themselves be found to be not ultimate, but developments in a 
 complex process? Like all individual meanings the sensory 
 quales as experienced are developments in an organic system of 
 meanings, a growth within the individual's experience. 
 
 Kiilpe points out that the form or pattern of the sensory stimu- 
 lation may be reacted to by consciousness to the exclusion of other 
 sensory attributes. Angell points out that on the side of the 
 development of the individual mind grossly different forms are 
 reacted some time before qualitative discriminations are made. 
 This would be the genetic statement of that which Kiilpe notes. 
 If we consider the conscious experiences involved in these reac- 
 tions noted by Kiilpe and Angell as sensory, then the sensation- 
 alist must admit that it here possesses a character very different 
 from that of those other experiences into which the qualitative 
 distinctions have entered in. 
 
 So far as consciousness is concerned, the attributes come into 
 being within the actual experience of the individual only at the 
 moment that a discriminative reaction occurs. 
 
 Human faces, for most of us, are perhaps among the most 
 interesting of objects. The mobility of the nostrils, the fine 
 lines about the eyes, the sensitiveness of the mouth, the depth of 
 the eyes, — all these are the basis of the subtle differences in our 
 reactions with reference to our fellows. And all this is mediated 
 by visual stimulation. We may have thought that we were 
 fairly familiar with these impressions. Yet on a day we wander 
 into a portrait gallery, perhaps it is our first time there, and as 
 we look at the pictures a sense of strangeness comes over us. 
 These are not like the faces of real life — never were there such 
 
106 CARL RAHN 
 
 deep shadows on any human face. We go out upon the street 
 and peer into the faces of the men and women that pass us — yes, 
 the painter was right. And henceforth the faces about us come to 
 have for us an added richness of meaning. Now if color tint be 
 accredited a sensation attribute, then the doctrine of the sensa- 
 tion element that comes into being always and only with all its 
 attributes must make its peace with the facts. Schultze points out 
 that the artist sees various tints and hues where the layman sees 
 naught but white snow. 45 In Pillsbury's words the layman might 
 be said to experience the "type". 44 Again, in glancing at a brass 
 vase one does not always perceive the distribution of light and 
 shade, but as in the case of the human face percept, mentioned 
 above, the color of the surface is often perceived as "all of a 
 piece". 
 
 Another case in point : The teacher of introductory psychology 
 has every opportunity to study the process by which the attribute 
 of "saturation" comes home to the consciousness of his students. 
 He will get from them the surprised remark that this has changed 
 their whole consciousness of color. Others have vaguely "felt" it, 
 but it had not been quite able to come clearly to consciousness. 
 Others never can "see" it. Surely Kiilpe's distinction between 
 conscious actuality and psychic reality is a most useful one at this 
 point for taking cognizance of the facts of difference that we 
 note here. If the "real sensations" are the same throughout, well 
 and good — let those who need it take comfort in the thought — 
 but the actual consciousness, the consciousness of our world of 
 thinking 43 and aiming and striving, is very different not only 
 on the side of mere character but also on the side of control, after 
 the discrimination has been made. The newly discovered attri- 
 bute is definitely a function of the complex attitude into which 
 we sought to bring our student by means of our similes and sug- 
 gestions in figurative speech. And having succeeded in bringing 
 the meaning home to him means just this : the enrichment of his 
 experience by this new mode of conscious reaction upon visual 
 stimuli ; and the method by which it is acquired is essentially the 
 same as that by which we are led to acquire any other new con- 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 107 
 
 scious reaction — as when one attempts to put another into that 
 attitude which will make possible for him the noting of the hidden 
 figures in the ambiguous drawing. 
 
 Now, either this attribute of saturation was always a part of 
 the student's actual conscious experience and that of color tint 
 always involved in the perception of human faces — in which case 
 it must be shown how these attributes were involved, whether 
 marginally or "sub-consciously" or as neural activity merely; or 
 else they come into existence as conscious experience in that first 
 discriminative reaction with reference to them. 
 
 If we take this latter point of view, the "sensation" as a fact of 
 consciousness must be stated as a development within the individ- 
 ual's experience which is enriched only gradually by distinctions 
 of sensory attributes. Genetic considerations lead us to note the 
 necessity of discarding the definition of sensation as a sum of 
 fixed inseparable "attributes", a definition that has been taken 
 over unquestioned from certain philosophical systems. Sensory 
 consciousness is no simpler than, but equally as complex as, any 
 other type of consciousness and the laws of its coming and going 
 are the same as those for the rise of any other form. 
 
 If we take even the simplest of our sensory experiences, we 
 shall find always that it can be adequately stated not in terms of a 
 bare "what", but that it involves a complex reactive process to 
 make it what it "is". Schultze tells us that the "whiteness" of 
 the perception of the snow may be not sensory but "conceptual". 45 
 The "thatness" of the quality also is, as we have seen, not as 
 Stumpf and Stout 48 would have it, a matter of inherent objectiv- 
 ity, but as our analysis leads us to believe, likewise a function of 
 the total situation in terms of which the sensory experience, as 
 Angell puts it, can alone be described. We have noted that the 
 process by which an "attribute" of visual experience comes to 
 consciousness for the first time, is a complex process, and our 
 account is very like that which Moore gives of the hypothetical 
 rise of one of his non-sensory categories. 42a Our similes, our 
 circumscriptions, our figurative speech, were essential factors in 
 creating a situation for our student that made possible for him 
 
108 CARL RAHN 
 
 the experience of the saturation aspect. To use the terms of 
 Moore, what we really created was an imageless category to 
 which the data of sense experience are assimilated. 41 For it is 
 these new attitudes that constitutes essentially one of the non- 
 sensory elements of the thought psychologists. When therefore 
 the thought psychologist postulates a "new element" he is attempt- 
 ing to overcome an inherent difficulty that he is coming to feel 
 with reference to stating consciousness in structural terms. But 
 the difficulty does not lie as he supposes in the insufficiency of the 
 traditional number of "ultimate" structural elements with which 
 he has hitherto operated, but rather in the fact that he is trying 
 to operate with "ultimate" structural elements at all. 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 If the sensations be not simple structural "ultimates" of con- 
 sciousness, we return to our question : How did the conception 
 have its rise?' — For the early philosophers of the modern period 
 the problem of knowledge was dominant. How does the mind 
 know the world? The mental objects were given in terms of 
 sensory qualities ; they were "impressions" of the real object upon 
 the tabula rasa of the mind. Permutation and combination of 
 the "simple ideas" gained in sense impression, give rise to all 
 other "ideas of sensation." Then there are certain phases within 
 the process of permutation and combination which may momen- 
 tarily become "objects" in themselves and we have as a result 
 those other "ideas of reflection", ideas of conscious activities. 
 But always the "ideas of sensation" are fundamental. 
 
 Thus sensation was an ultimate genetic category. Through this 
 gateway all knowledge comes to us, and thus the philosopher 
 was able to lay low the hobgoblin of "innate ideas". To be able 
 to proclaim that there are no "innate ideas", but that all knowl- 
 edge rests upon sensation, gave tremendous satisfaction to the 
 empiricists. Soon the genetic category, however, developed into a 
 content category. For Hume "qualities" are the only elements of 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 109 
 
 cognitive consciousness. The subsequent gradual development of 
 this conception of sensation as a structural category is an impor- 
 tant item in the history of empirical psychology. 
 
 Under the influence of physiological considerations the "im- 
 pressions" of Locke and Hume cease to partake of the nature of 
 "copy" of external objects and become essentially the conscious 
 correlate of the physical stimulation of end organs, or of the re- 
 vival of cerebral activity underlying past sensory experience. Yet 
 the influence of the "impression" theory still continues to be felt 
 in that the "sensation" and "image" is a real "item" of the 
 experience toward which the sensory stimulation contributes. 
 But another determining factor is that of Kantian philosophy. 
 In so far as we have in our contemporary definition of sensation 
 the item of "meaninglessness", 42 80 we note the influence of 
 idealistic philosophy with its distinction twixt sense and under- 
 standing.* 
 
 Arriving at the conception of Wundt and Titchener we find 
 that the sensation and image element is not the total mass of 
 sensory impression, or its revived image, as represented by the 
 "ideas" of Locke. These latter are conceived as "compounds" 
 of "complexes" that are to be analysed into "elements". These 
 elements then come to be minutely studied in isolation and thus we 
 Have attained to that massive body of knowledge on the psychol- 
 ogy of the senses. We may say that the sensationalists have been 
 fairly consistent in their structuralistic procedure. Actuated as 
 they are by the motive to trace consciousness back to its source 
 in sense, they attempt to analyze all cognitive consciousness into 
 component "sensations" and "images." Whatever we may say 
 concerning the nature of these as "ultimates", the structural 
 analysis may be regarded as legitimate only in so far as we always 
 bear in mind that when we say that an experience is analysable 
 into these and these "sensations", we can thereby mean only that 
 the sensory stimulation now mediating these "sensations," and 
 the cortical excitations underlying the "images" now in conscious- 
 ness under conditions of introspective analysis, — that this sensory 
 stimulation and these cortical excitations were functioning as a 
 * See above, Section XXIII. 
 
no CARL RAHN 
 
 unity in the experience that was held up for analysis, in such a 
 way as to contribute toward that peculiar experience of the con- 
 scious attitude of doubt, or the unified percept, in the actual 
 consciousness of just a moment ago. In so far as this position 
 is taken, the analytic psychologist, until he finds good grounds for 
 abandoning this method, is justified in "dissecting" actual con- 
 sciousness into "sensations." And all the while he can do justice 
 to the fact that actual consciousness appears often to have but 
 little in common with the sensation of the inseparable attributes. 
 But the moment he maintains that the attitude or percept is in 
 any way the sum of these sensations of the inseparable attributes 
 as actual conscious "processes," one must enter demurer. For 
 it would pledge us to the doctrine of static conscious elements, — 
 static, no matter how much we may protest that they are "pro- 
 cesses". Actual consciousness cannot be thus conceived. 
 
 Hume, however, was the point of departure not only for 
 empirical sensationalism, but also, through Kant, whom he had 
 awakened from "dogmatic slumber," for quite another movement 
 in philosophy, that in its turn has influenced psychology. The 
 "sense impressions" of Hume became the phenomena of Kant. 
 Over against these was the Reason that manipulated the phe- 
 nomena. The "real objects" of Locke became for Kant the 
 noumena, that underlie the phenomena. Kant, to be sure, 
 despaired of the possibility of an empirical psychology, but his 
 influence is clearly manifest in the psychological trend that we 
 are considering here. It is the activity character of conscious- 
 ness that occupies attention to-day. That this very aspect that 
 Kant despaired of seeing attacked by empirical methods, is also 
 the very one that the thought psychologists are grappling with, is 
 evidenced by Biihler's remark after the following citation from 
 Kant : "This schematizing on the part of our intellect is an art 
 hidden in the depths of the human soul ; and it is hardly probable 
 that we shall ever discover and lay bare this knack of nature." 
 Hereupon Buhler says: "It is evident that Kant has allowed 
 empirical considerations to enter in, and if we continue them 
 systematically, then we need not despair of our problem; it may 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY in 
 
 prove difficult, but we certainly shall discover and lay bare 
 these 'knacks' (of nature)." 16 For Kant, we saw, there were 
 two fundamental categories : sense and understanding. Through 
 sense the phenomena are given : through the understanding, the 
 meanings. How these came into being and how they functioned, 
 Kant despaired of ever discovering. Yet after him, we note 
 his influence in certain developments in contemporary psychology. 
 The Funktionen of Stumpf, the "acts" of Brentano, and the con- 
 ceptual categories and meanings that arise as a result of the 
 operations of these, still bear the marks of their derivation, 
 historically, from Kant's system. 
 
 In so far as the thought psychologist adheres to the Kantian 
 ordering of the categories, we run little danger of developing a 
 new structural "thought element." "Thought," for Kant, is an 
 activity, not a static given like the phenomena. In Stumpf, for 
 the most part, there is logical consistency in this respect. But 
 the psychologist with this philosophical bias has been trained in 
 the analytic structural psychology of the sensationalists. Now 
 the phenomenal mind of the sensationalist, no matter how much 
 he may protest to the contrary, is a somewhat that is to be dis- 
 sected into its elements. He has learned to note some of these 
 elements and has discovered much about their characteristics, 
 and it is in terms of these characteristics that he has defined them. 
 Thus the realm of phenomena has been minutely explored and 
 the results of the exploration taken up into the definition of the 
 elements. Yet all the while, the mind of the thought psycholo- 
 gist is occupied with his heart's desire, to understand the working 
 of the actual mind. But Kant himself had despaired of ever 
 knowing that, except by its results, and so one continues to labor 
 in the vineyard of the sensationalist. Analyse, analyse, analyse ; 
 state this, that, and the other formation, as colligation, as fusion, 
 or as assimilation, if you will; but above all things, analyse them. 
 So, like little Johannes of the Quest, they kept at it. But, as 
 with Johannes, a suspicion arises in them that what they are 
 finding under these conditions will not lead them to their heart's 
 desire : the understanding of the working of actual consciousness. 
 
ii2 CARL RAHN 
 
 They occasionally make faint attempts at piecing together the 
 phenomenal elements, to compare them with the original experi- 
 ence, — but that is a violation of the prescribed method. 
 
 Yet finally they take courage, and rise in open revolt. The 
 spell is broken, and they secede. They call the domain of the 
 master in whose vineyard they toiled in weary captivity, the 
 realm of Psychic Reality. Their own territory they call Con- 
 scious Actuality. And now they set to work. But what will they 
 do for a method ? 
 
 Trained so long in the school of the sensationalist, it is small 
 wonder that they take over much the same system of habits, and 
 much of the conceptual machinery developed there. The sensa- 
 tionalist takes his "given" experience, the percept or the attitude, 
 and holds it up ; he now has a new mental state in which he finds 
 sensations of special sense, kinaesthesis, etc. He may conclude 
 that the sensory stimulations and cortical excitations that now 
 mediate these sensations and images, when functioning in the 
 original state were to be correlated in part with the conscious- 
 ness of percept or attitude. The tendency, we saw, is often to go 
 a step farther, however, and to commit the fallacy of saying that 
 not only this sensory stimulation and cortical excitation, but 
 rather also the elements of the inseparable attributes presumably 
 now mediated by this neural activity, were also present. We 
 forget that the "sensation" and "image" are partly a function of 
 the neural activity of a different cortical system than was involved 
 in the percept that was called out a moment ago in response to 
 the same physical stimulation, which percept we held up and 
 "analysed." 
 
 Now some of the thought psychologists are just as prone to 
 fall into this error as is the sensationalist. Following accepted 
 methods they take, say, a perceptual experience, and ostensibly 
 try to discover any sensations or images that answer the struc- 
 tural sensationalist's definition of the "sensation element." Thus 
 they continue to regard actual consciousness as being capable of 
 a static, structuralistic analysis. And now they do what they did 
 not dare do under the old regime : They take, or try to take, the 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 113 
 
 "sensations" and "images" that were analysed out and compare 
 them with the feel of the original experience or one that they 
 believe to be like it. The result is that they discover that over 
 and above the "sensations" and "images" there is "something 
 more", and that is the "non-sensory" element. The method by 
 which this is obtained is interesting: Take three persons, segre- 
 gate them, stimulate each with a tonal stimulus. As a result you 
 must say that there were three sensations experienced. But put 
 the three sensations into the same consciousness and you have not 
 only these three sensations but something over and above them : 
 you have a clang or a chord. Again, take three lines, you can 
 experience them separately in certain definite positions and you 
 have simply "lines"; but experience them together, in the same 
 positions as before, and you have not only the three lines but 
 over and above these: the "triangle." The form-quality is the 
 "non-sensory" component. Or again: given a melody in a 
 certain key; then the same melody in another key. There is a 
 common "element." So far as "sensations" are concerned the 
 two experiences are wholly unlike. But they have something in 
 common : the "form." This, then, must be something over and 
 above the sensations. 
 
 Where the sensationalist, having analysed, ostensibly stopped 
 short, the thought psychologist does not stop, but approaches his 
 "original experience" of "actual consciousness" and compares the 
 products of his analysis with the original. He notes a difference. 
 This difference is postulated as "thought element." 
 
 Had the first philosopher of this attitude of mind — shall we 
 call him Plato? — stopped short where the sensationalist stops, 
 and then had no one after him dared to depart from his example, 
 we should to-day have no "thought element" to combat. But it 
 so happens that this first one did do the wicked deed, and since 
 then there are those who follow his example and attempt to tally 
 their analysis by some form of synthesis or reconstruction, and 
 always there is "something more." As to method, the sensa- 
 tionalist analyses and seeks to explain in terms of "body- 
 processes"; the other analyses and then attempts some form of 
 
ii4 CARL RAHN 
 
 reconstruction. And as a result of his attempt at reconstruction 
 he discovers that somehow, in the first analysis he overlooked an 
 "element". But having found it, he henceforth knows enough to 
 look for it at once and sure enough, it is always there. 
 
 Thus far this factor of form, pattern, plan, meaning, has been 
 considered only as it is supposed to appear as a "funded content" 
 in connection with other, sensory, elements. But one day 
 our thought psychologist comes along and finds that the 
 sensations of the inseparable attributes are not always dis- 
 coverable, yet the lamp of thought burns bright as ever. Sen- 
 sations and images sometimes occur, but they are as "sparks struck 
 off from thought in its progress rather than thought itself" 100 
 and they "hinder rather than further thought." All that there is 
 in consciousness is "thought," which is quite unlike the meaning- 
 less sensation or image of the inseparable attributes as defined 
 by psychology as a science. Actual consciousness, he concludes, 
 may therefore operate without "sensory" material. No longer is 
 there need of stopping to analyse in order to find the sensations 
 and images ; when they do appear they are known for what they 
 are, and then, for the most part, they are a nuisance. 
 
 Thus our thought psychologist, when he turns from conscious- 
 ness as sensation-mongering and image-mongering, to conscious- 
 ness as problem-solving, decides that consciousness is not made of 
 "image-stuff" but is essentially of the nature of "thought-stuff." 
 
 This then, is the account of the rise of the "sensation ele- 
 ment" and of the "thought element." Both of them are due to a 
 conception of consciousness as a somewhat that is capable of 
 static analysis, a somewhat that is constituted of part contents 
 which are to be described "as they are, existentially." That the 
 sensationalist, however, discovers but one class of cognitive ele- 
 ments whilst the thought psychologist discovers two, is due, as 
 we have seen, to a difference in their methods of procedure. 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 115 
 
 XXXV 
 
 Our thought psychologist concludes that there are two modes 
 of representation: one imaginal; the other reingedanklich, pure 
 thought. Buhler tells us that he can think a specific blue object in 
 two definite ways, first in terms of a visual image of the blue, 
 and then in terms of a purely unanschaulicher Gedanke, and that 
 the second is just as definite as the first. 13 — Now if an observer 
 should be found who only rarely has visual imagery and whose 
 auditory imagery is dependent in large measure upon the motor 
 factor involving the vocal organs as a provocative, — the visual 
 image being a rarely occurring phenomenon and evincing a pro- 
 found emotional response owing to its great unusualness and the 
 auditory imagery being bound up with the motor factor so that it 
 is seldom a free rising image, (and yet with all this the person 
 takes a keen delight in music and art presentations, but neverthe- 
 less finds it well-nigh impossible to recall in terms of auditory or 
 visual representation) — if such an observer should be found, we 
 would verily have a case of one who must and does refer to the 
 objects of his world in the manner that Buhler subsumes under 
 the head of imageless thought. But if such a one should maintain 
 that his whole conscious life is shot through with kinaesthetic ex- 
 perience — that every attempt to introspect precipitates such experi- 
 ence — that the meaning as kinaesthetic imagery often comes just 
 as near to the surface of the stream of thought as the meaning 
 of auditory in an auditory idea, — then for such a one it could not 
 be maintained that his thought was any more non-sensory or 
 imageless than is the auditory idea. It is no more "mere" kinaes- 
 thesis than is the auditory idea merely auditory imagery, for the 
 moment it becames kinaesthesis the "thought" is gone. 
 
 Our observer, we maintained, is almost wholly lacking in visual 
 ideas, and auditory ideas are supported as it were by the motor 
 factor of the vocal organs. But over and above this type of 
 experience involving auditory factors, our observer maintains 
 that there are others of another type, viz., just such 
 cases as that of Buhler's example of imageless thought that was 
 quite without "sensory" faqtors. There are certain definite 
 
n6 CARL RAHN 
 
 spheres of thought, certain "areas" of experience that involve 
 this type of activity. Indeed, our observer maintains that this 
 mode of thinking is in certain situations of his daily life a most 
 common occurrence during long stretches of time. In sooth, he 
 would be characterized by the thought psychologist as an ex- 
 treme example of "imageless" thinker. . . In human intercourse 
 persons of this type experience much of what Lipps and his 
 school appear to subsume under the term of Einfiihling. Their 
 attention does not appear to apprehend primarily the visual presen- 
 tation of another person before them, but rather his "very soul". 
 They come away with little knowledge of the person's outer ap- 
 pearance, but with a lively appreciation of his "inner life". The 
 writer has taken some pains in questioning this type and he finds 
 that many are surprised that not every one "knows" others in the 
 same manner as they do. The other person is experienced "from 
 the inside", as it were. There is a precipitant grasping of anoth- 
 er's meaning and a reaction to it before the other has uttered a 
 word. Such anticipation may at times approach close to the 
 uncanny. To some, this revelation of the other's personality 
 precipitates often a moral problem : is it right to look so deeply 
 into the living reality of another's being, for the very fibre of the 
 other's moral personality seems to be felt. The tendency "to 
 put one's self in the other's place" is singularly marked in these 
 persons. 
 
 Now such a person, though he can summon no visual image of 
 some particular blue under normal conditions, can still adequately 
 refer to it in his thinking. He can bear witness to the absence 
 from the experience of all "irrelevant images" with their insepar- 
 able attributes, and to the presence of all that Biihler claims for 
 his "non-sensory" thought. There is definitely "whatness" and 
 "thatness", — Wasbestimmtheit, and Intention. Indeed the that- 
 ness aspect, the Intention, is often a most prominent aspect of the 
 experience. 
 
 In the case of such experiences like that of Biihler's example, 
 the attempt to introspect reveals definitely a fleeting conscious- 
 ness of motor attitudes that, he believes, as attitudes functioned in 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 117 
 
 the thought by contributing especially towards the reference as- 
 pect, the Intention. Whenever such attempts are made to hold 
 up a memory experience in which the awareness of another's per- 
 sonality is central, the liveliest of kinaesthetic imagery is precipi- 
 tated. There is remarked an absence of imagery of the special 
 senses, but there is vivid imagery of posture, of holding the 
 head, of finer "feels" of characteristic movements of muscles of 
 the face, especially of the lips and eyelids. 
 
 When, in Kulpe's experiments, in the case of abstraction of 
 pattern or form from the visual presentation in actual conscious- 
 ness, the person is said to see actually only the form, and that 
 quality is abstracted from, we have a case that may be placed 
 alongside of the getting of the "meaning" of another's "person- 
 ality" as a part of the immediate percept — as it were. Our 
 observer, too, often can tell you nothing concerning the visual 
 appearance of the person, there is often no immediate memory 
 of the color of clothes, hair and eyes — in short no visual "image" 
 to give these details. And yet our observer has the knack of 
 pointing out aspects of character in another person that others 
 have discovered only after long acquaintanceship. Our observer 
 when attempting to hold up such an experience notes kinaesthetic 
 imagery (which is not to be confused with visual images of 
 movement or kinaesthetic sensations), and definitely emotional 
 factors. 
 
 On the side of mechanism, such a person cannot be "set" for 
 the sensory aspect of visual experience at all, but the path of 
 discharge appears to be mainly in a direct route away from 
 the visual cortex to the kinaesthetic and motor areas ; this would 
 appear to be the case especially when at some moments of ex- 
 perience our observer almost "forgets" that he is not the other, 
 but experiences with him, and is often actually "embarrassed" 
 with the other, in a situation. It is small wonder that this mode 
 of consciousness should appear to be more nearly allied to the 
 nature of "thought stuff" and seemingly more intimately "psy- 
 chical" than imagery of special sense. It appears to be peculiarly 
 of the essence of "meaning". And when Woodworth 105 main- 
 
n8 CARL RAHN 
 
 tains that the sensations are not the "meaning", that they rather 
 "call out" the meaning, our observer believes that he knows what 
 Woodworth is getting at. The visual image, in the case of 
 individuals in whom it is common, may be as "irrelevant" to the 
 meaning as is the visual "sensation" in the case of the perception 
 of another's "inner life" on the part of our observer. The "sensa- 
 tions" for Woodworth, call out the "meaning". Now it appears 
 that in so far as consciousness is concerned, the visual character- 
 istics of the person are not noted by our observer at all ; all that 
 is "there" in consciousness is the "meaning". For our observer 
 on the side of recall, however, the visual factor drops out almost 
 completely excepting in so far as the "feel" of its having been 
 originally a visual experience may be present as an "attitude" 
 (which is not a subtle, vague thing for the person of this type, 
 but often a very actual conscious experience, of the kinaesthetic 
 type). Woodworth's observer would not appear to be of the 
 extreme type that gets the "meaning" alone when perceiving a 
 person, and in whose consciousness the visual aspect is abstracted 
 from often almost completely. And on the side of recall, also, 
 it may be found that variations occur. Woodworth's observer, 
 when he "thinks" of the person, might get the visual aspect along 
 with the meaning; our observer maintains that the visual image 
 does not enter in. There may be also another difference on the 
 side of recall. The whole organization of the extreme kinaesthe- 
 tic type appears to be that to "call up" an experience, a thought 
 complex, the initial process is always a certain "attitude" that 
 then "brings up" the "thought" ; it may well be that for Wool- 
 worth's observer the recall is via the image of special sense which 
 is necessary to call up the "meaning." 
 
 Biihler appears to regard all thought which he does not believe 
 to be re-presentative but representative, as "imageless," and all 
 "imagery" that he does not believe to be re-presentative as "ir- 
 relevant." 27 Yet it may well be that the kinaesthetic type of 
 activity is just as re-presentative for some persons as the visual 
 is for others. And when Biihler does note just such phases of 
 experience that the introspective purpose occasionally loses from 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 119 
 
 the relations in which it is occurring, he shows the operation of 
 the fallacy that we pointed out in our discussion of method. He 
 says : "And if, in the case of such experiences which might be 
 expressed by such words as 'but' or 'or' or 'nevertheless', there 
 is a feeling as if I were going from something at my right to 
 something at my left, or from something in front of me to 
 something back of me — one surely would not wish in all serious- 
 ness to generalize upon this fact of experience in the form of a 
 conclusion that the real conscious correlate of these ideational 
 continuities is to be sought in these sensory elements." 10 Biihler 
 here proceeds as do all those who conceive consciousness as a 
 "substance" to be statically analysed. He assumes that sensations 
 are "real items" of experience, entities, that may float upon the 
 surface of consciousness, but do not constitute its essense. Its 
 essence is another entity : Gedanken. 
 
 Let us bear in mind the point that we arrived at as a result of 
 our inquiry: that the mistake of both the analytic sensationalist 
 and that of the analytic thought psychologist is often that they 
 forget that the conscious moment is as much a function of the 
 "modified cortex" as of the specific character of the inducing 
 stimulus. If, however, a conscious experience is to be character- 
 ized as "sensory" on the score that when the shift to the intro- 
 spective purpose takes place, we find certain "sensations" and 
 "images" present, and if we proceed on the hypothesis that we 
 may infer that a part of the nervous mechanism that is supposed 
 to be involved in this activity of analytic experience was function- 
 ing also in the interrupted experience — if such an experience of 
 "actual" normally functioning consciousness is to be characterized 
 as "sensory", — on this score, then, those very aspects of experi- 
 ence that the thought psychologist characterizes as essentially 
 "non-sensory", must be put in the same category as the seem- 
 ingly more patently sensory re-presentative experiences harking 
 back to the functioning of the organs of special sense. 
 
120 CARL RAHN 
 
 XXXVI 
 
 When Titchener characterizes the thought psychology as being 
 guilty of reflection, 93 it might legitimately retort that it is no 
 more and no less reflective than structural sensationalism. 
 
 The various forms of mental activity, imagination, percep- 
 tion, judgment, etc., as mental activities are supposed to have a 
 different "feel", yet the unreflective person may never have be- 
 come aware of these subtle differences; and only upon reflection 
 does he become conscious that there is such a difference between 
 the "feel" of the percept, and that of the thought, whether 
 imaginal or "pure", still referring to the same object the mo- 
 ment he turns his back upon it. It is only when he begins to 
 question the status of the two "objects" that the attitudes come 
 to consciousness in some way. Do the "feels" of these attitudes 
 have any sort of existence before we begin to reflect or question 
 with regard to them? Would we have to assign to them "psy- 
 chic reality" until reflection sets in and brings them into con- 
 scious actuality? 
 
 This much appears to be true: Reflection, not necessarily 
 psychological reflection, does bring to pass the awareness of 
 differences in the "feels" of the attitudes. It is only at those 
 stages in individual development at which changes or conflicts in 
 attitudes occur that we become aware of them, — that we become 
 conscious of the difference of the "feel" of the attitudes, and 
 this precipitation into consciousness upon further reflection may 
 again be operative in bringing about changes in the "feel" of 
 other attitudes. 
 
 But this process of increasing the richness of the feels of at- 
 titudes need not have its source in scientific psychological reflec- 
 tion, for there are precipitations of attitudes into consciousness 
 prior to the stage of reflection. In the actual normal develop- 
 ment of the individual sudden changes and conflicts in emotional 
 and purposive attitudes occur, which force the distinction be- 
 tween them home upon him. Paul on the road to Damascus "saw 
 a great light." This made a different man of him on the side of 
 overt behavior; but chiefest of all let us note that it is at the 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 121 
 
 point of such sudden changes that the attitudes are themselves 
 precipitated into consciousness, and whatever may have been their 
 status before, they now have a conscious meaning or "feel." In 
 this sense Paul's inner experience is just this much richer than 
 that of the "born" saint, whose mature attitude is the product of 
 a gradual development. This then as an example of a conflict 
 or sudden change in attitudes precipitating both into conscious- 
 ness. The earlier attitudes may have served a function within 
 the life activity of the organism, but they were not experienced 
 as conscious attitudes. So much for attitudes coming to con- 
 sciousness as a result of motor conflict. Generalized: attitudes, 
 whether instinctive or habitual, are precipitated into conscious- 
 ness at the point of sudden change or of conflict between them. 
 
 Next we note that once the individual has attained to the level 
 of reflection, it is through this reflective activity that changes are 
 introduced into other instinctive and habitual attitudes. Inject 
 reflective consciousness into instinctive and habitual modes of 
 response and the activity that was unconscious, now becomes 
 conscious and this coming to consciousness of the attitudes tends 
 to change them, not merely by making them conscious, but in that 
 the precipitation into consciousness tends to result in some read- 
 justment within the co-ordinations constituting the habit or ac- 
 tivity on the motor side. Reflection in a given case may make 
 possible, say, the coming to consciousness of certain stimulations 
 from the moving muscles of the legs in walking. The result is 
 that an observer notes that we possess a "conscious walk." The 
 act as overt motor occurrence is thereby changed. Among the 
 attention attitudes, which on the physical side are perhaps the 
 only types of acts that ought to be referred to as attitudes, we 
 find that the development on the unreflective level has advanced 
 far before elaborate reflection may enter in. We find various of 
 these attitudes prevalent in subhuman reactions. "Doubt" and 
 "belief", on our tentative hypothesis, would be originally mat- 
 ters of overt attitude. It is only when conflicts occur, that the 
 attitudes gradually become conscious attitudes, and it is in the 
 refinement and differentiation that results from their becoming 
 
122 CARL RAHN 
 
 conscious, that we must seek the beginnings of the elaborate 
 differentiated attitudes that are involved in the complex activi- 
 ties of the higher intellectual functions. 
 
 Genetically our hypothesis would see in the most elaborate 
 scientific attitude, — the holding of judgment in abeyance, the 
 functioning of control factors, of regulative maxims — in all 
 these we would see a gradual development that is a result of dif- 
 ferentiation and re-coordination of primitive instinctive attitudes 
 that develop at first primarily in the immediate response to peri- 
 pheral stimulation, but soon differentiate also along lines of idea- 
 tional activity. Children's "lies" (note quotation-marks), to cite 
 the most notorious example, are referable, on this hypothesis, to 
 the assumed fact that differentiation between the perceptual and 
 the ideational attitude-complexes, has not gone on apace. Now 
 reflection hastens the process of differentiation and reorganiza- 
 tion at the point where, through it, the instinctive or habitual 
 attitudes are precipitated into consciousness. The thought-psy- 
 chologist necessarily becomes aware of subtle distinctions in 
 attitudes of which he never before had become conscious. Such 
 a precipitation becomes, willy-nilly we believe, the beginning of a 
 reorganization just as truly as the injection of consciousness 
 introduces change into the walking. 
 
 Generalizing tentatively once more : not only does conscious- 
 ness arise at the point of change or conflict in habitual attitudes, 
 thus resulting in the precipitation of "feels" of the attitudes ; but 
 furthermore the injection of consciousness into an ongoing 
 habitual activity through "reflection", tends to change the ac- 
 tivity. The "acts" of the Brentano school, the Funktionen of 
 Stumpf, the "attitudes" of Judd and Titchener, the Bewusstseins- 
 lagen of Mayer and Orth (Bewusstseinslagen are well defined 
 by Biihler as a "consciousness of the thought process and espe- 
 cially of the turning-points in this process, in the conscious ex- 
 perience itself") 9 — all these might thus be said to have become 
 definitized in the actual experience of the psychologist in the 
 course of his reflections on the nature of thought and mental 
 activity. Yet the beginnings of this conscious definition, leading 
 
TION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY \2$ 
 
 i hypostatization, would lie genetically in the orig- 
 ve attitudes as types of motor reactions within 
 imental situations. So much for the genesis and 
 conscious attitudes. Functionally and as "felt", 
 is a product of the process of organizing going on 
 physical organism. Both on the side of function 
 us "feel" they develop partly under conditions of 
 ange ; partly their elaboration is due to their being 
 e organizing activity of consciousness. ... In other 
 inctive motor attitudes are precipitated into con- 
 :he point of conflict, and on the other hand the 
 nto the organizing matrix of reflection tends to 
 
 "attitude" as a conscious "feel" of activity is thus 
 and not an "ultimate", what about the "sensation" ? 
 >mit that just as an attitude becomes a conscious 
 ling of activity, a conscious Funktion, a Bewusst- 
 ir conditions when there occurs a conflict or sud- 
 the side of unconscious motor attitudes, and just 
 lay precipitate attitudes or habits of reacting into 
 and thus enrich consciousness by specific "feels" 
 : Funktion, or what not, so too, the enrichment 
 £ of experience as sensory may occur through the 
 ►r successive operation of stimuli calling out differ- 
 reactions. 
 
 to construct a hypothetical world in which no light 
 ian red were to act upon the retina, and if we were 
 rom childhood in this hypothetical world, we may 
 vhat sort of a visual consciousness would the child 
 t would be his experience when suddenly a yellow 
 ito his world ? What will our answer be ? For our 
 veal our notion of consciousness, of mind, or what 
 ■ve that a getting together on such highly hypothe- 
 cs this, would do much toward lifting the cloud of 
 ing now patently existing amongst the various 
 what sense is the redness the same before and after 
 
122 CARL RAHN 
 
 conscious, that we must seek the beginnings of 
 differentiated attitudes that are involved in the c 
 ties of the higher intellectual functions. 
 
 Genetically our hypothesis would see in the 1 
 scientific attitude, — the holding of judgment in 
 functioning of control factors, of regulative rr 
 these we would see a gradual development that is ; 
 ferentiation and re-coordination of primitive instir 
 that develop at first primarily in the immediate re: 
 pheral stimulation, but soon differentiate also alon^ 
 tional activity. Children's "lies" (note quotation-r 
 the most notorious example, are referable, on this 
 the assumed fact that differentiation between the ; 
 the ideational attitude-complexes, has not gone or. 
 reflection hastens the process of differentiation ai 
 tion at the point where, through it, the instinctr 
 attitudes are precipitated into consciousness. Th< 
 chologist necessarily becomes aware of subtle ( 
 attitudes of which he never before had become coi 
 a precipitation becomes, willy-nilly we believe, the 1 
 reorganization just as truly as the injection of 
 introduces change into the walking. 
 
 Generalizing tentatively once more : not only d 
 ness arise at the point of change or conflict in hab: 
 thus resulting in the precipitation of "feels" of the 
 furthermore the injection of consciousness into 
 habitual activity through "reflection", tends to cl 
 tivity. The "acts" of the Brentano school, the 1 
 Stumpf, the "attitudes" of Judd and Titchener, the 
 lagen of Mayer and Orth (Bewusstseinslagen an 
 by Biihler as a "consciousness of the thought pro< 
 daily of the turning-points in this process, in the 
 perience itself") 9 — all these might thus be said to 
 definitized in the actual experience of the psych< 
 course of his reflections on the nature of though 
 activity. Yet the beginnings of this conscious defir 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 123 
 
 eventually to an hypostatization, would lie genetically in the orig- 
 inally instinctive attitudes as types of motor reactions within 
 certain environmental situations. So much for the genesis and 
 the nature of conscious attitudes. Functionally and as "felt", 
 their character is a product of the process of organizing going on 
 in the psycho-physical organism. Both on the side of function 
 and of conscious "feel" they develop partly under conditions of 
 conflict and change ; partly their elaboration is due to their being 
 caught up in the organizing activity of consciousness. ... In other 
 words the instinctive motor attitudes are precipitated into con- 
 sciousness at the point of conflict, and on the other hand the 
 being drawn into the organizing matrix of reflection tends to 
 change them. 
 
 If then, the "attitude" as a conscious "feel" of activity is thus 
 a development and not an "ultimate", what about the "sensation" ? 
 We would submit that just as an attitude becomes a conscious 
 attitude, a feeling of activity, a conscious Funktion, a Bewusst- 
 seinslage, under conditions when there occurs a conflict or sud- 
 den change on the side of unconscious motor attitudes, and just 
 as reflection may precipitate attitudes or habits of reacting into 
 consciousness and thus enrich consciousness by specific "feels" 
 of activity, of Funktion, or what not, so too, the enrichment 
 of the meaning of experience as sensory may occur through the 
 simultaneous or successive operation of stimuli calling out differ- 
 ent conscious reactions. 
 
 If we were to construct a hypothetical world in which no light 
 waves other than red were to act upon the retina, and if we were 
 to be reared from childhood in this hypothetical world, we may 
 ask ourselves what sort of a visual consciousness would the child 
 have, and what would be his experience when suddenly a yellow 
 is introduced into his world ? What will our answer be ? For our 
 answer will reveal our notion of consciousness, of mind, or what 
 not. We believe that a getting together on such highly hypothe- 
 tical question as this, would do much toward lifting the cloud of 
 misunderstanding now patently existing amongst the various 
 "schools." In what sense is the redness the same before and after 
 
I2 4 CARL RAHN 
 
 the introduction of the yellow light? Was there any conscious 
 redness at all before the noting of the difference between the 
 two lights? Did it exist in Kiilpe's psychic reality before the 
 precipitation into conscious actuality ? Or will we say simply that 
 the redness and the yellowness came into conscious existence at 
 the same time? 
 
 We would here revert to our analysis of the behavior of 
 meanings. If this analysis was essentially sound, we conclude 
 that in so far as it is dependent on objective stimulation, con- 
 sciousness is aroused only at the point of differences, of change 
 in that stimulation; if the objective stimulation remains constant, 
 consciousness tends to subside. In so far as consciousness still 
 continues to respond to the uniform stimulus, this is conditioned 
 by a shift in the meanings evoked by the stimulus. As Angell 
 has pointed out we must note always new aspects, new sides, new 
 attributes of the object if we would keep it in consciousness. 2 If 
 this statement has any justification, then, applied to our hypotheti- 
 cal child, the redness would be born into consciousness only at 
 the point of the introduction of the differing stimulation. Gen- 
 eralized once more: the unfolding of experience as sensory 
 would be a gradual development; each and every new discrim- 
 ination thus induced by the introduction of new forms of stimula- 
 tion, would tend to change the actual conscious experience of all 
 the related "elements." 
 
 Such a statement, if we may entertain it at all, even hypothetic- 
 ally, would be supplemented by another, which we have touched 
 upon also in our earlier attempt at analysis. Not only does con- 
 sciousness appear to arise at the point of change in objective 
 stimulation and tend to subside when habituation has set in ; but 
 conversely; when reflective consciousness is injected into the 
 sensory phase of experience, it tends to introduce changes therein. 
 If we revert to our case of putting our student into an "attitude" 
 that would enable him to discriminate the aspect of saturation, we 
 have a case where reflective consciousness functions in bringing 
 out the new aspect. The "attribute" becomes a function of the 
 "attitude" which we create in the student by the use of similes 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 125 
 
 and what not. In other words, the process of differentiation, 
 begun at the point of change introduced into the objective stimu- 
 lation, is continued with the rise of reflection, and thus the con- 
 stitution of sensory experience as conscious becomes just as much 
 a function of "reflection", as are the attitudes. And a psycholo- 
 gist, interested in the activity phase of consciousness, might just 
 as legitimately make the attitude the ultimate of experience instead 
 of the sensation. Our analysis, however, tentative as it is, would 
 lead us nevertheless to conclude that a more adequate grasp of 
 the nature of human experience will be gained by a realization 
 that neither the one nor the other is "ultimate." 
 
 XXXVII 
 
 With this, we would close our attempt at analysis of certain 
 problems in contemporary psychology. . . . We have meandered 
 along a devious path. . . . We have discovered bit by bit that it is 
 verily true, as Titchener points out anew 31 that all consciousness 
 is in continual flux. We have seen that observation of conscious- 
 ness, from the point of view of a psychological purpose, inevitably 
 introduces changes into the ongoing process. We saw also that 
 the very changes that a psychological purpose introduces into 
 the process, are of vital interest to the psychologist, for it is at 
 this point that psychology may give to the life of to-day a con- 
 tribution in the way of control analogous on the side of "inner" 
 experience to the control given by the physical sciences on the 
 side of "outer" experience. . . . The problem of the "actings" 
 of the mind has come home to us anew, and calls for investiga- 
 tion. Even though the psychologist should find that they are but 
 "another way of looking at" what is "existentially" "one and the 
 same process", this "other way" of looking at it may bring to 
 light new facts about the "process". Is this awareness of the 
 "actings" contemporaneous with the awareness of the "objects" ? 
 Is it peculiarly marginal as compared with the percept, and must 
 we therefore distinguish between the functions of the focal and 
 
126 CARL RAHN 
 
 marginal consciousness? Questions such as these, along with 
 the questions of meaning and purpose, will have to be faced 
 squarely by a psychology that would do justice to the subtler 
 aspects of consciousness. . . . We have seen, furthermore, that 
 the attempt to get at consciousness "as it is, existentially" under 
 the influence of a psychological purpose, is but one of many 
 purposes that might give form and meaning to the incoming 
 stimulations, and that the analysis of the "that" into sensations 
 is the process that ensues normally when the more complex 
 habitual interpretations prove inadequate. This is the normal 
 method of "reconstituting the object". If the psychologist's sen- 
 sations are artifacts, we may turn to consciousness in the con- 
 crete and find there the prototype of the psychological analysis 
 into sensations which yields not artifacts but actual control 
 factors that have meaning in a concrete situation. When we can- 
 not depend on our "knowledge" that we have really locked the 
 door, we go back and try it; if it does not yield, we go away 
 believing it to be locked; but if doubt assail us once more we 
 return, place the key in the lock, open the door, then close it and 
 turn the key, concentrating attention to the utmost upon the 
 kinaesthetic and visual sensations that are to form the basis of 
 our assurance that we have really locked the door. The response 
 of consciousness to stimulation as "sensations", occurs under 
 certain definite, problematic conditions, when other reactions, 
 whether conscious or unconscious, fail. When his interpretation 
 of the "world" fails the philosopher, he may come back to the 
 "facts of sense" from which to construct the world anew, but he 
 gets from sense only that which comports with his purpose and 
 his problem. The psychologist's "sensation" is but one of many 
 potential "contents" that might be aroused by the same objective 
 source of stimulation. And when the stimulation is reacted to as 
 a "sensation" it is the exigencies of the moment that determine 
 what "aspect" of the sensation is to be reacted to. There is 
 nothing sacrosanct in the union of the "attributes". . . . We have 
 noted further that certain historic conceptions that have come 
 down to us, stand in need of re-definition. There may be a 
 
SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 127 
 
 wholesome efficacy in the scholastics' faith in the value of the 
 unraveling of the implications of concepts. An historic analysis, 
 coupled with an analysis of the concrete situations of human 
 experience in which the current psychological concepts have their 
 beginnings in the individual mind, is a method that may prove 
 to make no mean contribution to our body of psychological 
 knowledge. ... A host of problems has been stirred up and there 
 is much labor ahead; nevertheless, the time would seem to cau- 
 tion us to halt and re-examine the conceptions by means of which 
 we would analyse and explain this somewhat, whether thing, or 
 process, or function, that we call consciousness, — and then, 
 having become clearly aware of the nature and the origin of* 
 these conceptions, return to the task anew. 
 
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130 CARL RAHN 
 
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SENSATION IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY 131 
 
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