A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    chologists believe that only the four ‘ principal ’ color-qualities are elemental and that all the others are analyzable into two or more of the four-. Other psychologists hold that there are as many elemental as distinguishable color-experiences. Into the details of this rather academic discussion we need not enter. (b) Visual Qualities: Experiences of Colorless Light Besides our experiences of color — of red, green, blue, and the like — we have also the introspectively different expe¬ riences of colorless light, that is, of white, gray, and black. There is wide diversity among psychologists in their account of the relation of these experiences. Some reckon the con¬ sciousness of gray as a complex experience analyzable into that of white and of black; others hold that there is but one colorless light quality — the consciousness of gray, and that the experiences of white and of black are really experiences of light and dark gray.* A third view enumerates among the colorless light elements the consciousness of white, of black, and of all distinguishable grays. A fourth view recognizes three colorless light qualities (the consciousness of white, of black, and of gray), explaining the differences in sensations of gray as distinctions in intensity. It is unnecessary and perhaps impossible to choose between these accounts. The important point is to note the evident distinction between the ‘ colorless-light qualities,’ the consciousness of white, of gray, and of black on the one hand, and the ‘color-qualities’ on the other. Significant also is the fact that though one may have the colorless-light consciousness without the color-conscious- * For experiment, cf. Sanford, “Experimental Psychology,” 140a. (Ref¬ erences throughout the footnotes to “Sanford” are to this book; and the numerals refer to his numbered experiments.)
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