A Source Book in the History of Psychology [antikvár]

PREFACE A historical source book represents an intermediate stage between the past as it actually was and as it is recounted in a historical narrative. It is a selection from the original documents, a selection that any historian unavoidably makes as he writes a scholarly history. It would be hard to say how close to completion the historian is when he reaches the sourcebook stage, but let us say he is halfway there. By this stage, he has selected from the innumerable events of the past the decisive ones for an understanding of subsequent events, but he has not yet set down his interpretations and justifications. The cautious reader will bear in mind that a source book is thus only little less arbitrary than a history. A source book may be, however, more than merely a half-completed history, for it contains the very words in which the important ideas were stated, the raw data, as it may be said, of historical study from which any reader may draw conclusions. Instead of organizing our source book chronologically, we have sorted the great writings of the past into fifteen separate chronologies, corresponding to the fifteen chapters. Modem psychology is multidimensional, and so is its past. Fourteen of our fifteen chapters deal each with a specific topic in psychology; the fifteenth traces opinion about the nature of psychology itself. We have Umited ourselves to topics in the history of experimental or quantitative _psychology^ omitting the history" of social and cUnical psychology and recognizing that even within our chosen field we have been neither exhaustive nor unbiased. Because our source book is topically organized, certain outstanding writers inevitably turn up in more than one chapter. We have tried to come no closer to the present than 1900, but occasionally more recent work has made it seem essential to push a httle way into the present century. In general, we have arranged each section chronologically, but occasionally when a topic is bifurcated we have followed along one branch and then gone back to complete the other. We have tried to use the more important edition of a work, the first or a later one, according to which is the more appropriate. For each chapter we have provided an introduction which is to some extent a preview of the topic considered. Km'' ^ i:' w Vll