Boris Sidis

“ The neurologist to whom a psychological training is truly invaluable, finds himself ill at ease when in his investigations he strikes a problem which has to be studied mainly from a psychological point of view. A piece of tissue, a lump of protoplasm, a nerve cell with its dendrons and axons can be stained, mounted, observed, and experimented upon, but who can get hold of a fact of consciousness, of an elementary psychic state, of a sensation, of a feeling, of an idea, stain them, put them under the microscope for scientific investigation? ”

“ Facts of consciousness, we pointed out, are the subject matter of psychology. The question arises as to the sources of the facts. The botanist, when he wishes to carry out a series of experiments, goes into the herbarium or into the field to gather the material for his study. The entomologist collects his specimens on the street, field, and forest. The same holds true in the case of all other sciences. The external world is infinitely rich, it is an inexhaustible mine from which physical science draws its facts. ”

“ The psychological knowledge of animals can only be obtained from the observation of their action, of their behavior, or of their adaptations to their environment. The same holds true in the case of human psychology. Man does not differ from other animals and should be studied in the same way. This, if I understand Watson aright, is essentially his position. Watson goes to the extent of denying the very existence of "centrally initiated processes," he reduces all psychology to peripherally induced processes, sensory and motor. ”

“ It is this: the world of the physicist, the biologist, and the psychologist is the same, a world consisting of objects―their interests center around different objects, to be sure, but the method of observation of these objects is not essentially different in the three branches of science. ”

“ Introspection will ever remain the fundamental method in normal and abnormal psychology. The very problem of sensations, ideas, images, thoughts, affects, emotions, has no meaning without introspection. We must know the psychic states or mental processes from our own experiences. ”

“ It is essential to our position to have affection reducible to sense processes. It is even more probable that the mechanism is glandular; that very slight increase in the secretion products gives us the one group ”