Abstract

What is disappointing of course is not the dispersion of psychology into so many diverse subjects, but their apparent lack of relation to a central core of laws and theories. The topics of psychology, such as sensation, perception, cognition and emotion, which are treated in the first section of the present book, do not appear to constitute a general base for the branches of psychology, for clinical psychology, nor for the so-called borderland subjects. The branch--Animal and Comparative Psychology--does not carry over from general psychology a basic theory of learning, which it then adapts or applies to its own special field. On the contrary, contemporary theory of learning, or rather theories, have been largely evolved within this branch. Similarly, Psychometrics, Child Psychology, and Applied and Social Psychology have, to a great extent, developed their own principles and methods.