In the last twenty years," Boring wrote in 1932, "the pendulum has been
The images never quite gained an independent status . . . The feelings, too, began to give way before the sensations. James . . . had held that emotions are characterized by their sensory content. Other psychologists (e. g. Stumpf in 1907) had argued that the simple feelings are sensations. Finally Nafe (1924), in Titchener's introspective laboratory a t Cornell, came experimentally to the conclusion that the simple feelings, pleasantness and unpleasantness, are simply bright and dull qualities of sensory pressure. No wonder Titchener could conclude (posthumously, 1929) that introspective psychology deals solely with sensory materials. Sensation had won the day. Conscious content is ips0 facto sensory (Boring, 1933, pp. 18-19).
swinging away from the multiplication of mental elements." Now this would have been quite a trick even for Titchener. I have seen him described as a "Jehovah in black broadcloth" (Gibson, 1967, p. 130), but I have nowhere else seen posthumous conclusions ascribed to him even by his most ardent admirers.2
A closer look into the chronology will make unnecessary this excursion into spiritualism. Nafe's experiments, published in 1924, were begun in October, 1922. The passage in the Systematic Psychology to which Boring refers is to be found in the third chapter. This chapter engrossed Titchener, Weld, his editor, assures us, from May 1918, when Chapter I1 was completed, until December 1919, when Titchener put it aside as complete (Titchener, 1929, p. v). Thus Boring cannot be correct when he tells us:
The convincing identification of feeling with sensation came about, not from the arguments of Bourdon, von Frey and Stumpf . . . but from the introspective experiments of J. P. Nafe (Boring, 1933, p. 32).