Preface to The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation
Charles Hartshorne
This book presents a theory of the sensory qualities. The theory may be called, for brevity’s sake, the doctrine of the “affective continuum.” It was first conceived as an attempt to solve certain problems of a philosophical character. But it was natural that the treatment which the subject of sensation has received in experimental psychology should have come to occupy an ever larger place in the inquiry. In the end it is the topic of sensation as a whole and however approached with which I have sought to deal. Being a philosopher by training, I have not scrupled to give serious consideration to speculations which to a psychologist might seem of negligible value (e.g., in chaps. iii and vi); but, on the other hand, I have assembled a considerable quantity of experimental data (chaps. 11, iv, vii) which hitherto has lain scattered through the psychological literature, largely unknown to philosophers, and apparently not as yet correlated and seen as a whole even by psychologists. In short, I have sought evidence and suggestions bearing upon the question “What is sensation?” wherever such evidence or suggestions could conceivably be found.
It will be obvious that I have been much influenced by two philosopher-scientists who appear to have a good deal in common—Charles S. Peirce and Professor A. N. Whitehead. In a general way I take my conclusions to be, for the most part, compatible with their views. The central idea of this book occurred to me, however, at a time when I was quite ignorant of these philosophies. An earlier obligation was to the philosophical idealists, especially Royce, Creighton, and my former teacher, Professor William Ernest Hocking. If, indeed, “idealism” means that reality is essentially spiritual, and if “spiritual” means, as I think it should, irreducibly socio-emotional, or having to do with “love,” then the most general conclusion which I feel warranted in drawing from the evidence supporting the affective continuum is an idealistic one. But many of the chief historical suggestions of the word “idealism” I should as little wish to defend as the “realists.”
The psychological sources upon which I have principally drawn are not confined to any particular school or group, but I feel especially indebted to the late L. T. Troland, to Professor E. G. Boring, and to Julius Pikler. Only in the third case, however, does this indebtedness involve any close similarity of psychological outlook.
With the current behavioristic emphasis in psychology (of which a recent expression is Boring’s Physical Dimensions of Consciousness) I have sufficient sympathy to believe that unless conceptions of sensation can, sooner or later, be made physiologically definite, they are probably of little value. Yet it has seemed to me that the failure so far to verify conclusively a single major hypothesis—with one exception which, as we shall see presently, only reinforces the rule—concerning the operation of the several sense organs may derive in part from an erroneous analysis of the primary data of the problem, the sense qualities as immediately given.
My attempt has been to show that erroneous modes of sensory analysis have indeed prevailed, but that other modes are beginning to appear (Pikler, and Marston, Daly, and Marston) of which the concept of the affective continuum is a partly new version. From this concept a number of physiological consequences follow whose experimental testing is probably only a matter of time. For instance, the recent experiments (beginning with those by Wever and Bray) upon the relation of pitch to frequency of nervous conduction are deducible from the analysis of auditory quality which I had previously worked out, while they certainly are not deducible, except in an indirect and uncertain fashion, from traditional introspective analyses.
The first five chapters are predominantly argumentative. Chapters i and ii furnish, it is hoped, a sufficient refutation of the supposed axiom that sensory qualities are necessarily inexplicable, for they show that a theory to explain them is quite conceivable. Chapter ii attacks the prevalent alternative to this theory as inconsistent with the facts and as belonging to a pattern of theory elsewhere discredited in science. In chapter iii it is argued that the conflict of philosophical opinions concerning the nature of the physical world cannot be settled unless a new approach to the problem of sense data can be found, and that with such an approach a reasonable measure of agreement might be attained. Chapter iv depicts psychology as standing at the threshold of a new generalization concerning the nature of sensory experience, and indeed concerning mind generally. Chapter v is an attempt to derive the affective continuum from the data of aesthetics, and to show its value for this study.
The last three chapters are largely expository, and are to be regarded as highly tentative. Chapter vi might be called a deduction of the dimensions of quality. The problem of the nature of mind is reduced to a conception of variables of “feeling of feeling,” social feeling as such, and their possible values. Sensation is exhibited as but a certain portion of the range of these values. In chapter vii these conceptions are applied to the details of sensory experience. Chapter viii indicates some of the consequences for biology and cosmology.
I am indebted to Professor Edwin Arthur Burtt, of Cornell University; Professor Everett W. Hall, of Leland Stanford University; and Professors Arthur C. Bills and Ralph W. Gerard, of the University of Chicago, for helpful suggestions; to my wife, Dorothy C. Hartshorne, for the host of improvements in style and organization which are due to her skilful editorial assistance; and, finally, to all my former teachers in philosophy and psychology at Harvard. For the index, as well as for friendly encouragement and criticism, my grateful thanks are due to Professor Clyde B. Cooper.
My object in publishing this book is in part to acquire a new indebtedness—to those who may be moved to join with me in an inquiry the present outcome of which is only less baffling to me than it is likely to be to the average reader. I cannot see my way back to the prevailing ideas of sensation—these ideas seem visibly waning in influence and full of absurdity—but neither can I escape the feeling that some portion or other of the alternative I have set up is likewise unsatisfactory. How large is that portion, and what can be done to reduce it? Or is science not yet in a position to deal with the problem? That my own method is insufficiently scientific, objective, I am aware. Yet if it serves to induce those capable of bettering it to do so, it will not have failed in its purpose.
Charles Hartshorne
University of Chicago
February, 1934
Source: Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, pp. vii-x.