GENERAL MEETINGS.

MONDAY, AUGUST 1

The President opened the proceedings with the following address:

In opening this second meeting of the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, I have to begin by offering a cordial welcome to the foreign psychologists who-at a time when the country is more attractive than the most fascinating town-have come, from all parts of Europe and from beyond the Atlantic, to take part in our debates in London. The list includes many names long familiar to all students in psychology; and to the printed list I am glad to be now able to add the great name of Helmholtz, who is coming to take a look at experimental psychology in London, before he passes on to physics in Edinburgh.

A special welcome is due to those among our visitors who form. a link of continuity between the present meeting, and the initial congress that was held in Paris three years ago. We are especially glad to see among us Prof. Richet, of whose energy and tact and cordial hospitality the visitors at the last Congress. carried away so pleasant a recollection. We much regret that ill-health has deprived us of the presence of M. Ribot, our President three years ago; who has, however, testified his interest in our proceedings by sending a paper. No one could have been found so fit to preside over the first congress, led in the timehonoured centre of European culture, as M. Ribot, who, as editor of the Revue Philosophique, had for half a generation acted as the standard-bearer of empirical pyschology in France: and who

by his comprehensive and sympathetic studies oth of the English and the German lines of psychological thought, as well as by his own masterly independent work, seemed especially marked out to preside over the initiation of these international meetings of psychologists.

The contemplation of M. Ribot's qualifications reminds me through the well-known law of association by contrast-of the inadequacy of my own. I feel that several other Englishmen, including some for whose assistance on the present occasion I am most grateful, would have more appropriately occupied this position; which has been assigned to me chiefly in consequence of the benevolent interest which the first congress was disposed to take in the special enquiries to which my own experimental work has been mainly confined. But my personal unworthiness is a dull topic; in passing from it, I would merely say, that the narrowness of the basis on which my own claims rest has, I hope, had no tendency to narrow the conception that I have formed of the proper work of the Congress. I observe that Professor Wundt, in a recent number of his Philosophische Studien, suggests the probability that under my influence "clairvoyance, under the innocent mask of a statistic of hallucinations," will be the chief topic at our present meeting: but this only shows that the most accomplished psychologist is liable to go rather wide of the mark, if he is determined to express his opinions on matters on which he is determined to seek no information. It has, on the contrary, been my aim-as I hope our programme showsto avoid giving an undue place to the enquiries in which I am especially interested; to make our list of papers as adequately representative as possible of the various lines of enquiry, pursued by very diverse methods, which are included within the range of our subject. But I could hardly have hoped to realise this aim without the invaluable aid of my colleague Professor Sully; to whose intermediation we are further indebted for the privilege of meeting in these buildings, which the authorities of University College have liberally placed at our disposal.

And here I may add that Professor Sully's predecessor, Professor Croom Robertson-known to all English-reading psychologists as the editor of Mind for sixteen years, desires me to express his deep regret that circumstances prevent him from taking part in welcoming the members of the Congress to the rooms of the College in which he has so long represented pyschology.

The selection of England as the place of this second Congress does not, I hope, need defence; but it suggests an admission which ought to be frankly made. It must be admitted that England has fallen somewhat behind in the recent movement of psychology in the experimental direction; - if the term "experimental" be taken in its more ordinary sense, to denote investigation under artificial conditions, prepared with a special view to the investigation. English psychologists have taken hardly any part in the efforts that have been made during the last thirty years, with continually increasing vigour, to convert psychology into an exact science by precise experimental determinations and measurements. England has, in fact, -so far as I know-no properly equipped psychological laboratory; if I might say that we have made a beginning of one in Cambridge, it is a beginning so small that it would require very minute and delicate sociological observation to detect it.

I have no wish to palliate our deficiencies in this respect. Indeed, I have always hoped that one of the advantages we should obtain from this meeting would be a stimulus to make some efforts to remove these deficiencies. I have hoped that the inevitable comparison of our position, not only with that of Germany, which originated and still leads this movement, but also with that of our American cousins-who, with characteristic energy, have developed eight or nine psychological laboratories in the last few years—would produce in our breasts a salutary humiliation, the precursor of amendment.

At the same time, I ought to point out that, in the discussion held in Paris three years ago, which led to the selection of the term "Experimental Psychology" to denote the basis and scope of our present association, the word "experimental " was not understood in the stricter sense in which I have so far used it. It was understood in the wider sense in which M. Ribot uses it in his book on English psychology, where he characterizes as "école expérimentale" what in English we should commonly speak of as the " Empirical School." And if our name be taken in this wider sense-to include the whole science of mind so far as it is based upon induction from observed facts-no one, I think, will contest the established claim of England to be the ancient and original home of the science; in which the method of empirical-reflective observation and generalisation has been carried on for two centuries by a line of eminent thinkers, from Locke and Hume down to Bain and Spencer in our own day

It had been my intention, in these introductory remarks, to examine more closely the relation of the older method of empirical psychology, in which England has historically led the way, to the newer method in which-since the work of Weber and Fechner-the leading place has belonged undisputably to Germany. But this work has been fortunately undertaken by one whose views on the subject will interest the Congress far more than mine could do-I mean Dr. Bain, whose paper stands first in our list.

I confine myself, therefore, to the humbler function of explaining how my colleagues and I have planned the work of this Congress.

First, then, having as I have explained-to deal with a certain ambiguity in the word "experimental," we have thought it best to take it in a sense intermediate between the stricter and laxer meanings that I have just contrasted. That is, we have taken it to include any investigation in which the reasoning is based on observations methodically pursued for a special purpose, and not merely those in which the method is in the strictest sense experimental. The distinction between experiment and systematic observation of experience, however broadly important, is not of a kind that would justify a separation, for the purpose of discussion, between the results attained by the two methods respectively: especially as the superiority of experiment to mere. observation-though in a general way indisputable-is by no means universal. The mere fact that the conditions under which a phenomenon is observed are due to human agency does not necessarily secure the greater knowledge of the conditions, and the fuller power of ascertaining the causes of variation in the phenomenon observed, which are the characteristic advantages of experiment. For instance, though I set a very high value on hypnotism as a means of psychological experimentation, it seems to me that we are more likely to discover the physiological conditions of disorders of the memory when they arise naturally from lesions of the brain, than when they are produced artificially by hypnotic experiment.

But, though we have thus extended the meaning of the word "experimental," we have not taken it as simply equivalent to empirical; we have not desired to comprehend the whole range of the discussions which would properly be included in a complete treatise on Empirical Psychology.

For a large part of the work of such a treatise must consist in defining the fundamental notions, and ascertaining the distinctions and relations between different elements of consciousness, -sensation inner and outer, perception, apperception, emotion, desire, volition, and so forth-mainly by reflection on and analysis of the commonest and most ordinary experience. Now I believe that very important work of this kind remains to be done; and I have much sympathy with the view urged in a pamphlet that I have received for distribution among members. of the Congress, which illustrates forcibly the confusion caused by one established antithesis of terms. But it seemed clear that this kind of discussion ought to be kept subordinate at such a meeting as this. Progress in this part of the psychologist's work is usually better attained by solitary reading and reflection. Accordingly, what we have mainly sought to bring forward here for comparison and criticism are the results of methodical interrogation of experience, with a view to obtain definite answers to definite questions, which mere reflective analysis of ordinary experience does not enable us to solve.

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I have spoken of the term "experimental psychology was adopted at the first Congress to denote the subject of our discussions I should like to add a few words on the term "physiological psychology" which was thereby superseded. It was superseded because it was felt to be too narrow; since the systematic investigation of the facts and laws of mind, which we wished to claim as our sphere, must clearly include inquiries which could not properly be called physiological. But the change was not intended to imply any depreciation of the value of physiological knowledge and physiological methods to the psychologist. Any such depreciation would have been altogether opposed to the views of the overwhelming majority of those who met in Paris three years ago. Indeed-as at English Statesman recently said that "we are all socialists now"-so I should be inclined to say for students of psychology that "we are all physiologists now," if only scientific knowledge and trained faculty could be taken up and put of with the same ease as a political creed. But as this is unfortunately not the case, I will only make the humbler statement that all students of psychology-including those who are most op. posed to materialism, for whom I feel specially qualified to speak, -are anxious to learn the lessons that physiology has to teach; without presuming to have an opinion on controverted questions