The Teacher and the Laboratory: A Reply

IN the April number of The Forum there appeared an interesting article, by Professor Bliss, of the School of Pedagogy at New York University, entitled Professor Münsterberg’s Attack on Experimental Psychology. It was a reply to a paper which I had published in the February number of The Atlantic Monthly, about the value of experimental psychology to methods of teaching.

On the question itself there is no reason for me to say an additional word. I have said what I had to say, and I have not changed my views. I believe still in every word of my original essay, and I have no desire to repeat it. But I find in it some little misunderstandings, and some little confusions, and some little misstatements, and some little absurdities, all of which suggest my attempting a slight read justment for the sake of a clear understanding.

My personal interests also urge me to reply, for I tremble to think what psychologists may finally do with me, if this kind of metamorphosis of my views is allowed to continue. Professor Bliss calls my words against the psychologists so “direful ” that they “ remind us of those which years ago thundered forth from these same New England hills, portraying the terrors of future punishment.” After this, surely I may be allowed a few words to clear up my real intentions.

Professor Bliss, in his title, calls my paper an “ attack on experimental psychology,” and condenses its content into the significant phrases that I “ attempt to crush the rising spirit of the American teachers ; ” that I tell them, “ in tones of authority, that if they value their pedagogical lives they will never again set foot within a psychological laboratory ; ” and that the psychology courses in the universities, “ so far as teachers are concerned, are all nonsense.” Professor Bliss ought to have concealed from his readers the fact that experimental psychology is my own field of work, and that I have devoted to it the greater part of my researches ; but since he says all these things himself, his readers will hardly believe that I suddenly “ attack ” my own line of work, and that I choose for such a suicidal onslaught the publicity of a popular magazine. They will perhaps themselves come to the suspicion that I did not “attack ” experimental psychology itself, but only its frivolous misuse. There remains, of course, the other possibility, that I have suddenly changed my views ; that I believed in experimental psychology till 1897, and that I attack it in 1898. But there are some witnesses who know better. I have given my lecture course on empirical psychology in Harvard University, this year, before three hundred and sixty-five students, perhaps the largest psychology course ever given anywhere, and I think even Professor Bliss could not introduce into these lectures more demonstrations and discussions of experiments than I do. A very large proportion of these students will become teachers. Is it probable that before so many witnesses I would do three times every week what I publicly call “ nonsense ” ? Is it probable that I intentionally force so many men to do just what I publicly pray them not to do “ if they value their pedagogical lives ” ?

It may be that the readers of Professor Bliss are prepared to expect from me even such improbable tricks ; for the greater part of his eloquent essay has no other purpose than to show that inner contradiction is my specialty. My words are “ inconsistent both among themselves and with their author’s own position in educational matters.” Let us consider first the latter case. The contradiction between my paper and my practical position in educational matters is indeed shocking. I have said that experimental psychology cannot give to teachers to-day any pedagogical prescriptions, and now Professor Bliss unmasks and discloses the fact that “ the writer of this article is the sole deviser of a set of psychological apparatus, designed by him especially because of their pedagogical value in furthering psychological experiments in the schools.” I must confess that I am guilty: I designed a set of apparatus for the school teaching of psychology. I had at that time no presentiment that any one would ever fail to see the difference between the teaching of psychology and psychological teaching. If I say that school children ought to be taught about electricity, I do not mean that the teaching itself ought to go on by electricity ; and if I instruct my students about insanity, I do not think that my instruction itself needs the methods of madness. Why is the willingness to teach psychology, then, an acknowledgment that all teaching must apply psychological schemes ?

Professor Bliss and many other friends do not see that the relation between experimental psychology and the teacher can have a threefold character. First, the teacher may become prepared to teach elementary experimental psychology in the schoolroom, just as he would become prepared to teach physics or zoology. Second, the teacher may use his school children as material to study experimentally the mind of the child in the interest of theoretical scientific psychology, and thus to supply the psychologist with new facts about mental life. Third, the teacher may try to apply his knowledge of experimental psychology in his methods of teaching. These three possibilities have almost nothing at all to do with one another. Any one of the three propositions can be accepted while the two others are declined. My own opinion is that the first is sound, the second doubtful, the third decidedly bad; and only with the third did my paper deal.

The teaching of elementary psychology in the school seems to me, indeed, possible and desirable, and I have always done my best to help it, not only by that suspicious set of apparatus, but by other means as well. I have taught some bits of psychology even to my two little children, who are less than ten years old, but I have never made a psychological experiment on them ; and above all, I have never misused my little theoretical psychology by mixing it with my practical educational work. I call the second proposition doubtful, the proposition that the teacher makes psychological experiments on the children in the interest, not of pedagogics, but of psychology. Theoretically there is no objection to it, but practically there is a grave objection. It seems to me harmful for the child, misleading to the teacher, and dangerous for psychology, because the teacher cannot do experimental work in a schoolroom in a way which will satisfy the demands of real science. Almost everything of that kind that has yet been done shows the most uncritical dilettanteism. But even if all this were not so, — if psychological experiments were the most healthful recreations for children, and the most inspiring sources of ethical feeling for teachers, and the most precious treasures of information for psychologists, —what has all this to do with our question whether the individual teacher can make use of our laboratory psychology for the improvement of his general teaching ? It is only this pretension that I have emphatically denied. Psychology, I have tried to show, will give later to scientific pedagogy the material from which prescriptions for the art of teaching may be formed ; but if the individual teacher should try to transform the facts we know to-day into educational schemes, nothing can result but confusion and disturbance. I showed that this is the more certain as the idea that experimental psychology measures mental facts is perfectly illusory ; there is no quantitative mathematical psychology, and the hope of exact determination in the service of education is vain.

In every one of these points Professor Bliss discovers contradictions between my words and ray actions, between my article in The Atlantic Monthly and my scientific publications. Especially in two points every denial seems hopeless. I say that mental facts cannot be measured, and nevertheless I have published experimental psychological papers with " long columns of figures.” He exclaims dramatically : “ If mental measurements are not being made in the Harvard laboratory, pray, forsooth, what is being done ? What means that vast assemblage of delicate apparatus ? ”

I think that this question can be answered in a few words. We cannot measure mental facts, because they have no constant units which can be added, but we can analyze mental facts in our self-observation. If the self-observation goes on under the natural conditions of daily life, we have the ordinary psychology ; but if we introduce for our selfobservation artificial outer conditions which are planned for the special purpose of the observation, then we have experimental psychology. These artificial outer conditions are represented in that delicate apparatus, and the exact description of their physical work often, indeed, requires columns of figures. We can never measure a feeling, but we can measure the physical stimulus which produces a feeling ; and if we ascertain exactly the quantitative variations of the stimulus, and analyze in the self-observation the corresponding qualitative variations of the feeling, we may get a scholarly paper about the feeling, in which many figures leap before the eyes, but in which the feeling itself has not been measured. Even if my publications looked like logarithm tables, I should stick to my conviction.

But I must defend myself against still stronger suspicions. I said that the results of experimental psychology are today useless bits for the teacher who is looking for practical help in his teaching methods, and that we have nothing to give him. And now it is found that I myself have given to teachers by my actions all that help which I cruelly denied them by my words : the opposite would have been worse, but this seems bad enough. Professor Bliss writes : “ Among all this work, none is more suggestive than that of the laboratory whence come these notes of warning. In the first volumes of the Psychological Review we notice among the Harvard Studies the following titles : Memory; The Intensifying Effect of Attention ; The Motor Power of Ideas ; Æsthetics of Simple Forms ; Fluctuations of Attention, etc. All these investigations were reported by our critic himself.”

I do not deny it, and I regret only one thing, — that my critic, instead of devoting his attention only to the titles of these papers, did not take the trouble to consider also their content. Certainly memory and attention and ideas are of great importance for the educator, and I should at once conclude that papers about such subjects are highly important for him if I found that the papers deal with those subjects from a point of view related to that of the teacher. I am sorry to say, the papers which I have published, in spite of their seductive names, do just the contrary. They work toward a most subtle theoretical analysis of the elements of objects that must interest the educator only as wholes. Every teacher makes use of the chalk a hundred times in the classroom. Will you tell him that he needs chemistry because in the magazines of that science there are papers in the titles of which the word “ chalk ” appears ?

I take a simple illustration. “ Attention ” is certainly the great thing in the classroom ; every teacher suffers from the fluctuations of attention, and tries to intensify attention, and these things are the subjects of my papers. One of them studies how in fractions of seconds different just perceivable optical stimuli vary for our apperception if the eye remains absolutely unmoved ; the other seeks to determine whether the sensations of acoustical and tactual stimuli lose by distraction not only vividness, but also intensity, — a change in any case so small that statistical methods become necessary to find it. These researches were the starting-points for important theoretical discussions about the most subtle processes going on in attention ; but if a teacher, in an unfortunate hour, should begin to catch the attention of his pupils on the basis of these papers, it would be advisable to send a warning notice about him to the teachers’ agencies of the whole country. And if my own papers are of no use to the teacher, how must it be with the other literature of this kind, if even my critic says that “ among all this work none is more suggestive than that of the Harvard laboratory ” ? He is quite right in that: all the publications of the other laboratories are just as unsuggestive for the immediate practical use of teachers as my own.

But why should there be such an unjust preference for the teachers ? If the community of headings and titles forms the fraternity between psychologists and teachers, why not give the bliss of psychology also to other good fellows in the cities and towns who have the same right to demand that those walls about our work at last fall ? I think, for instance, of the artists. It would be unjust to conceal the fact that we now make in the psychological laboratory studies on the fusion of tone sensations ; of what use is it to the virtuoso to practice piano-playing instead of investigating with us first the whole psychology of tones ? and what a perspective for the piano-tuners ! In our dark room we work on colors, — the relation of blue to the rods of the retina is under discussion ; how can a painter dare to use ultramarine in his brush before he has labored through these experimental studies ? One thing lies especially near my heart. We have in our laboratory a complicated apparatus with which we experiment on the psychology of poetical rhythm. I do not see how a poetical soul can hope in future to write a poem in good rhythm before he has seen at least a photograph of that apparatus.

However, I do not wish to exaggerate Professor Bliss’s forgetfulness. It is true he forgets the artists, but that does not mean that he favors the teachers only ; no, we are told that “ experimental psychology with this spirit contains the promise and potency of great assistance for law, medicine, and theology.” Especially does his suggestion about theology seem to me excellent; after the kymograph education, certainly the kymograph religion with a chronoscope theology must be the next step of civilization. The best thing would be that our laboratories should arrange a kind of college settlement in every group of the population ; they all need us, — the ministers, and the physicians, and the lawyers, and the teachers, and the children.

Finally, a word about the attitude of the schoolmen themselves. Professor Bliss has here, it seems, his strongest foothold, — at least his words swell up to an unusual energy: “ Professor Münsterberg has not realized the inspiration of the hour. He misses the whole spirit of modern science and American science teaching. He betrays a low ideal of what teaching should be, and an almost intentional ignorance of schoolroom work.” “ The idea of the American teacher abandoning psychology at this late day is humorous,’ he says, and so on in a score of variations. There seemed little hope for me, but I began to inquire what the official educators had said about the matter. I looked into the different educational magazines and school journals. Almost all discussed my paper, and I could not find one that was not in sympathy with my endeavor.

Professor Bliss emphasized the contrast between “the fair New England hills ” from which I see the world and the rest of the universe. But I find that even in his Greater New York the best educators and schoolmen are on my side. The Educational Review is regarded as our best pedagogical magazine, and its well-known editor, Professor Butler, of New York, as one of the best champions of the teachers. He began his editorial for March with the following words, in which I drop only the too friendly epithets : “ Sober students of education have been pointing out for some time past the illusory character of the belief that somehow these laboratory movements could be applied in the technique of schoolroom work, and we have been waiting to see some one step out from the ranks of the psychologists and call attention to the utterly unphilosophical and unscientific character of this assumption. Professor Munsterberg has performed this service ; and while the representatives of the other view may wriggle a little in his grasp, they will find that their occupation and influence are gone.” Does the Educational Review also “ betray a low ideal of what teaching should be ” ? Does Professor Butler, too, the head of the pedagogical department in Columbia University, suffer from “ an almost intentional ignorance of schoolroom work ” ?

Not only the papers, but hundreds of letters from schoolmen have brought me the same approval. If the newspapers report him correctly, one educational orator from Chicago said, the other day, amid the cheers of his audience, that I will do a vast amount of damage, but only in the East. I am obliged to confess that two thirds of the approving letters to me have come from the West. Indeed, as I consider all the literature which has found its way to my desk, it reminds me more and more of an experience which I had some time ago. There came to me here in Cambridge the president of a teachers’ club in another town, asking me to give a talk before his club on the importance of physiological psychology for the methods of teaching. He made a long speech about the brain, and the ganglion cells, and the gyri, and the nerve fibres, and Harvard, and pedagogics, and how it was absolutely necessary that I should accept his invitation to talk on these favorite subjects. I listened patiently, and when he had finished I told him that I could not go, as I should not satisfy the members of the club, because I did not believe in the connection of brain physiology and pedagogics. But the effect I produced on him was quite unexpected : he clapped me jovially on the knee and cried, “Then you must come the more, as we none of us believe in it! ”

Hugo Münsterberg.