PSYCHOLOGY BY EDWARD L. THORNDIKE Second Edtion NEW YORK 1905 INTRODUCTION I have been invited to contribute a preface to this book, though when I ask myself, why any book from Professor Thorndike's pen should need an introduction to the public by another hand, I find no answer. Both as an experimental investigator, as a critic of other investigators, and as an expounder of results, he stands in the very forefront of American psychologists, and his references to my works in the text that follows will, I am sure, introduce me to more readers than I can introduce him to by my preface. In addition to the monographs which have been pouring from the press for twenty years past, we have by this time, both in English and in German, a very large number of general text-books, some larger and some smaller, but all covering the ground in ways which, so far as students go, are practical equivalents for each other. The main subdivisions, principles, and features of descriptive psychology are at present well made out, and writers are agreed about them. If one has read earlier books, one need not read the very newest one in order to catch up with the progress of the science. The differences in them are largely of order and emphasis, or of fondness on the authors' parts for certain phrases, or for their own modes of approach to particular questions. It is one and the same body of facts with which they all make us acquainted. Some of these treatises indeed give much more prominence to the details of experimentation than others— artificial experimentation, I mean, with physical instruments, and measurements. A rapid glance at Professor Thorndike's table of contents might lead one to set him down as not belonging to the experimental class of psychologists. He ignores the various methods of proving Fechner's psycho-physic law, and makes no reference to chronoscopes, or to acoustical or optical technics. Yet in another and psychologically in a more vital sense his book is a laboratory manual of the most energetic and continuous kind. When I first looked at the proofs and saw each section followed by a set of neatly numbered exercises, problems, and questions in fine print, I confess that I shuddered for a moment. Can it be, I thought, that the author's long connection with the Teachers College is making even of him a high-priest of the American "textbook" Moloch, in whose belly living children's minds are turned to ashes, and whose ritual lies in text-books in which the science is pre-digested for the teacher by every expository artifice and for the pupil comminuted into small print and large print, and paragraph-headings, and cross-references and examination questions, and every other up-to-date device for frustrating the natural movement of the mind when reading, and preventing that irresponsible rumination of the material in one's own way which is the soul of culture? Can it be, I said, that Thorndike himself is sacrificing to machinery and discontinuity? But I had not read many of the galleys before I got the opposite impression. There are, it is true, discontinuities in the book which might slightly disconcert a critic with a French turn of taste, but that is because of the intense concreteness with which the author feels his subjet and wishes to make his reader feel it. The prob |