- seCtIon one: tHe PRoBLem
still drawing-room, given up to her meditation. [. . .]
she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw
the disk of the moon when it was partly masked
by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon
now – she saw the whole man. [. . .] she lingered in
the soundless saloon long after the fire had gone
out. There was no danger of her feeling the cold; she
was in a fever.(Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881)William James was able to build on a large body of research in
anatomy, physiology, and psychophysics. Psychophysics is the
study of the relationship between physical stimuli and reportable
sensations – or, you could say, between events and experience.
Psychophysicists such as Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner stud-
ied the relationships between physical luminance and perceived
brightness, weight and sensations of heaviness, and sound pres-
sure and loudness. From this research came the famous Weber–
Fechner Law relating sensation to the intensity of a stimulus.
Fechner also wanted to be able to relate sensations to excitations
within the brain, but in his time this was simply not possible.
If James’s Principles helped found the modern science of
psychology in North America, the experimental work being
carried out in Germany was creating a similar movement on
the other side of the Atlantic. In 1850 Hermann von Helm-
holtz made the first measurement of the conduction speed
of nerve signals. This was popularly referred to as the ‘velocity
of thought’, although in fact he had measured peripheral pro-
cesses and reaction times, and argued that conscious thought
and the interaction of physical and mental processes goes on
in the brain. He was especially interested in visual illusions and
the tricks that our senses can play, and he proposed the novel idea that what we
see is not the representation of the stimulus on the retina but is determined by
inferences and expectations.
The empiricism of the likes of Helmholtz set the scene for another important trend
in the European history of the psychology of consciousness: phenomenology.
Phenomenology cuts across our neat philosophy/psychology divide, because it is
both a philosophy and a psychology based on putting subjective experience first.
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl argued for going back to ‘the things
themselves’. By this, he meant that we should go back to the ways that things are
actually given in experience, not back to the physical objects which the empiricist
would work with. The method he proposed was a systematic inquiry into immedi-
ate conscious experience. This inquiry was to be done without preconceptions, by
suspending or ‘bracketing’ any scientific and logical inferences about the world.
This suspension of judgement he called the phenomenological reduction or
epoché (see Chapter 17).PRoFILe 1.2
William James (1842–1910)
William James was born in New
York, the eldest of five children,
one of whom was the novelist
Henry James. When they were
young their wealthy father took
the family travelling all over
Europe, educating them inter-mittently along the way. James continued his transat-
lantic travels most of his life, speaking several languages
fluently and getting to know the foremost scholars and
scientists of his day. At 18 he wanted to be a painter,
and then after long bouts of despair and depression he
studied medicine at Harvard, where he eventually taught
physiology, psychology, and philosophy. He married in
1878 and was a devoted family man. His Principles of
Psychology (1890), based on twelve years of introspec-
tive investigations, has been called ‘the best-known book
in all psychology’ (Gregory, 1986, p. 395). It made him
famous for such phrases as ‘the stream of consciousness’
and ‘the specious present’. His other books include The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Pragma-
tism (1907). He was a firm believer in free will and a
personal spiritual force. He died of heart disease at his
summer home in New Hampshire.