Wundt holds out the promise of an experimental [p. 120] method. He should have been more explicit: for technology as well as science-medicine as well as physiology, engineering as well as physics-makes use of experiment. His actual purpose, as we trace it in the chapters of his book, is to transform psychology into an experimental science of the strict type, a science that shall run parallel with experimental physiology.[42] He failed, no doubt, to see all that this purpose implied, and his earlier readers may be excused if they looked upon his work as an empirical psychology prefaced by anatomy and physiology and interspersed with psychophysical experiments. There is plenty of empirical psychology in the volume. If, however, we go behind the letter to the informing spirit; if we search out the common motive in Wundt's treatment of the familiar topics; if we carry ourselves back in thought to the scientific atmosphere of the seventies, and try in that atmosphere to formulate the purpose that stands out sharp and clear to our modern vision; then the real significance of the Physiological Psychology cannot be mistaken. It speaks the language of science, in the rigorous sense of the word, and it promises us in this sense a science of psychology. But Brentano also speaks of a 'science' of psychology. Which of the two authors is in the right?

We need not here trace the doctrine of attention further; we need not either debate whether the problem of attention is included in Wundt's formal statement of the task of experimental psychology. We may, however, as an illustration of the interweaving of the two systematic threads

Concepts are not "psychical formations" at all; if we psychologise them, we discover only their substitutes in consciousness, spoken or written words, accompanied by a vague and indeterminate feeling.[27] Judgments, in the same way, belong to logic, and not primarily to psychology; logic and psychology approximate only as a result of the parallel growth, long continued, of conceptual thinking and its expression in language; our "conscious psychological [p. 116] processes" consist originally of nothing more than ideas and their connections.[28]

It is true that we never have act without content. When we ideate, we sense or imagine something; when we judge, [p. 114] we perceive something, acknowledge the truth of something, recall something; when we love or hate, we take interest in something, desire or repudiate something.

This thorough-going difference of argument and description means, of course, a radical difference of attitude toward psychology itself. It means that Brentano and Wundt, in spite of formal and material agreement, psychologise in different ways. Our next step, therefore, is to place ourselves inside the systems and to realise, so far as we may without too much detail, what manner of discipline they intend psychology to be. We have to choose: and the illustrations that follow will show the alternatives of choice in concrete and tangible form.

The argument, none the less, is always secondary and oftentimes plainly tentative; so that the book as a whole gives the impression of incompleteness, of a first essay which can be improved when more work (and a great many suggestions of further work are thrown out[17]) has been accomplished. Hence it is no accident, but rather a direct reflex of the spirit in which the authors approached their task, that Brentano's volume still bears the date 1874 while Wundt's book, grown to nearly triple its original size, has come to a sixth edition.[18]

When the ground has thus been cleared Brentano's doctrine, novel though it may be, has the appearance (so to say) of a necessary truth; we feel that we have duly considered the possibilities in the case and have come to the one rational decision; and if for conscience' [sic] sake we go on to deduce and to verify, we still are assured beforehand that everything will fit together within the system. Minor points may need to be expanded; even, perhaps, in the light of further aporiae, to be corrected; but the whole exposition gives the impression of finality.[14] It is no wonder, then, that many students have judged the author successful in his aim of writing, not Brentano's psychology, nor yet a national psychology, but -- psychology.[15]

Brentano entitles his book 'psychology from the empirical standpoint,' and Wundt writes 'physiological psychology' on his title-page and suggests 'experimental psychology' in his text.[12] The adjectives do not greatly help us. For all experimental psychology is in the broad sense empirical, and a psychology which is in the narrow sense empirical may still have recourse to experiment.

We find, again, that Wundt says nothing of a question which for Brentano is the essential problem of psychology as it was the first problem of psychophysics, the question of 'immortality,' of the continuance of our mental life after death, and conversely that Brentano fails

We shall better understand the nature of this choice which lies before us if we first note the points of resemblance between the two systems.

Psychology, on the contrary, has laid strong hands upon them, and is to dominate all their further thinking. Wundt, a generation [p. 110] later, will round off the manifold list of his books with the encyclopaedic folk-psychology, and Brentano never gives up the hope of a descriptive-to be followed, perhaps, at long last by a genetic-psychology as the ripe fruit of his studious old age.

Such, in briefest outline, were the conditions under which the two psychologies acquired their form and substance. We see, on the one hand, a man who has devoted his 'hours of solitary reflection' to ancient and mediaeval philosophy we see, on the other hand, a man who has wrought out In the laboratory his contributions to the latest-born of the experimental sciences.

the mistake, namely, of supposing that psychology is nothing more than an applied logic; and the mistake was repeated in a popular work upon human and animal psychology which followed on the heels of the technical volume. By 1874 he had definitely discarded this earlier view for the conception of psychology as an independent science. He still maintained. however, that the path to it leads through the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system.

We possess, unfortunately, only the first volume of his Psychologie: Brentano seems always to have preferred the spoken to the written word: but this volume, like everything else that he has given to the press, is complete in itself, the finished expression of his mature thought.

The student of psychology, though his personal indebtedness be also twofold. must still make his choice for the one or the other.