PREFACE

This manual is designed to meet the requirements for a séries of individual experiments in the first course in psychology. It makes individual experiments, as opposed to class démonstrations, practicable, regardless of laboratory facilities or the size of the class. The student is given means and encouragement for pursuing each problem intensively in order that he may acquire independence of thought and action, realize the actuality of mental processes, and get hère and there a vision of the vastness, the orderliness, the practical significance, and the charms of mental life.

No laboratory facilities are required. In this there is a triple gain : it saves the manif olding of equipment, it frees the student from the technicalities incidental to the manipulation of apparatus at a time when his énergies need to be conserved for the grasping of the psychological problem, and it saves time for the class period, the experiments being adapted for outside assignments. The apparatus other than that ordinarily at the disposai of students is supplied with the book in the accompanying envelope.*

* The président of a collège asked a distînguished psychologist how much money his board ought to appropriate for the equipment of a fair elementary laboratory. The reply came: "Three thousand dollars a year for a good instnictor and one dollar for paper and pins." This manual supplies the paper and pins and, in part, the instructor.

PKEFACE

The experiments are independent and self-explanatory. Provided the manual is used in connection with the customary elementary text-book or lectures, the experiments require no introduction ; the directions are adéquate, and the running comment furnishes the setting for each step and enables the student to see the significance of the results. The beginner needs much help in his experiments in psychology, and there is no more practical way of giving it than through a manual.

This is not a laboratory manual. It is a manual of experiments which the student should perforffi before he is admitted to the laboratory, or in case he does not in tend to pursue the subject beyond one course. It is not a text-book by itself , but a supplément to any good text-book. It does not review the field of psychology, but simply furnishes the intensive, individual, expérimental part of the instruction. It does not f urnish technical instruction on methods of experimenting, but, like the conversational method of teaching language, everywhere encourages right procédure. It does not purport to cover the most important matters ; sometimes an almost insignificant topic (for example, the subject of the first chapter) is chosen for the purpose of deepening insight. It by no means supplants the class démonstrations and experiments, except in the few topics selected, and even hère the instructor may profitably supplément and show how the same experiments may be performed by the usual laboratory apparatus.

The manual présupposes such knowledge of the nervous System as is imparted by the text-books most used in psychology. It aims to retain the most generally ac-