Abstract

Psychology does not get rid of its problems by taking experience at its face value, for it is the province of psychology to study problems arising when experience is taken at its face value. Only in actual lived experience is concrete reality to be found in its fullest sense. All reality which is experience includes attributes both spatial and temporal. Objects cannot b7 considered in the first place apart from such attributes. Physical objects are perceived as parts of a total situation and there is merit in the suggestion of the Gestalt psychologists. Always much will be found in the perceptum which will not correspond with the physical object, since the physical object is only an abstract. The effort to control our environment has led to a sophisticated attitude toward perceptual experience, which is said in psychological circles to lead to the stimulus error. Those who have seen children gradually grow into a realization of the unreliability of perception—for purposes of muscular manipulation—will understand what is meant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)