I am now used to this question. In the two months that I have been in America, with the exception of the two leading questions as to how the climate of New England pleases me, and whether we play football in Germany, I have heard no other question so frequently. Both are wrong. Vivisection, and still more spiritualistic experiments, are totally excluded from the psychological laboratory. And yet these laboratories have never had to complain of a scarcity of material on which to work.
Psychology has, in fact, no lack of weighty questions, which can be answered by experiment alone.
Thus far, at no time and at no university in the world have the first four conditions been simultaneously so well fulfilled as at Harvard. We have fine laboratory rooms, we have the most ample and complete collection of psychological apparatus in the world, we have three instructors exclusively for Psychology, and have, in addition to the average of fifty students who are engaged in the course of laboratory practice, a dozen young men of advanced standing, most of whom spend the largest part of their working hours upon investigations in the laboratory. But interest can be developed from knowledge alone. Twenty years ago no psychologist had as yet established a laboratory, though many had desired one. Fifty years ago such a desire would have been almost incomprehensible.