The Autonomic Functions and the Personality1

There was a time in the history of psychology when psychological treatises were the product of the study. This was the period of the true academic psychology when the psychologist evolved the principles of mental action by an introspection of his own mental processes and presented the results largely interwoven with metaphysical speculations and discussions of such matters as the parallelistic relations of mind and body.

With the growth of experimental science psychology was largely transferred from the study to the laboratory and with the advance of knowledge about the sense organs it took on the features of a refined physiology of the special senses. In this stage of its development psychology undertook a dismemberment of the cruder concepts of the functions of those special sense organs, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, into their component parts as determined by the nature of the stimulus and the speed of reaction to it. This was the period of reaction-time psychology the principles of which, as they had been worked out with reference to the sense organs, came also to be applied to the more complex mental processes such as association and judgment. One of the principal results of this period of psychological investigation was the formulation of the sensation as the unit of all psychological processes. The sense organs, as the result of their stimulation by the objects of the environment, transmitted sensations to the central nervous system where in turn these sensations were accumulated and elaborated into perceptions and thus formed the crude experiential material for those reactions which were calculated to effect a relating of the organism to its environment. Added to the residuals of past experiences through the medium of memory, conscious or unconscious, there was slowly built up the abstract, conceptual material necessary for the higher