Outlines of Psychology Author:Harald Hoffding Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: § 3. METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY. 1. Since psychology has for its object, not specific contents of experience, but general experience in its immediate character, it... more » can make use of no methods except such as the empirical sciences in general employ for the determination, analysis, and causal interpretation of facts. The fact that natural science abstracts from the subject, while psychology does not, can be no ground for modifications in the essential character of the methods employed in the two fields, though this fact does modify the way in which the methods are applied. The natural sciences, which may serve as an example for psychology in this respect, since they were developed earlier, make use of two chief methods, namely, experiment and observation. Experiment is observation under the condition of purposive control by the observer, of the rise and course of the phenomena observed. Observation, in the narrower/ sense of the term, is the investigation of phenomena without! such control, the occurrences being accepted just as they are naturally presented to the observer in the course of experience. Wherever experiment is possible, it is always used in the natural sciences; for under all circumstances, even when the phenomena in themselves present the conditions for sufficiently exact observation, it is an advantage to be able to control at will the rise and progress of these phenomena, or to isolate the various components of a composite phenomenon. Yet, even in the natural sciences the two methods have been distinguished according to their spheres of application. It is held that the experimental methods are indispensable for certain problems, while in others the desired end may not infrequently be reached through mere observation. If we neglect a few exceptional cases due to spec...« less