PRESS OF
THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY
LANCASTER, PA.

* * * * *

PREFACE.

The appearance of the HARVARD PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES does not indicate
an internal change in the work of the Harvard Psychological
Laboratory. But while up to this time the results of our
investigations have been scattered in various places, and have often
remained unpublished through lack of space, henceforth, we hope to
have in these STUDIES the opportunity to publish the researches of the
Harvard Laboratory more fully and in one place. Only contributions
from members of the Harvard Psychological Laboratory will be printed
in these volumes, which will appear at irregular intervals, and the
contributions will represent only our experimental work;
non-experimental papers will form an exception, as with the present
volume, wherein only the last one of the sixteen papers belongs to
theoretical psychology.

This first volume does not give account of all sides of our laboratory
work. An essential part of the investigations every year has been the
study of the active processes, such as attention, apperception, and
volition. During the last year several papers from these fields have
been completed, but we were unable to include them in this volume on
account of the space limits; they are kept back for the second volume,
in which accordingly the essays on the active functions will prevail,
as those on perception, memory, and feeling prevail in this volume. It
is thus clear that we aim to extend our experimental work over the
whole field of psychology and to avoid one-sideness. Nevertheless
there is no absence of unity in our work; it is not scattered work as
might appear at a first glance; for while the choice of subjects is
always made with relation to the special interests of the students,
there is after all one central interest which unifies the work and has
influenced the development of the whole laboratory during the years of
my direction.

I have always believed--a view I have fully discussed in my 'Grundzuege
der Psychologie'--that of the two great contending theories of modern
psychology, neither the association theory nor the apperception theory
is a satisfactory expression of facts, and that a synthesis of both
which combines the advantages without the defects of either can be
attained as soon as a psychophysical theory is developed which shall
conside