Excerpt from The Aesthetic Experience; Its Meaning in a Functional Psychology: A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature of the University of Chicago in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Functional psychology as a method for the reformulation in terms Of concrete experience Of both psychologic and philosophic problems has hitherto been focused on those types Of conscious experience the recon structive character and bearings Of which are most Obvious. In the field Of psychology proper it has dealt with the act Of attention; in logic, with the judgment process; in ethics, with the winning Of new ends for con duct; in metaphysics, with problems Of epistemology rather than with problems of ontology. Although postulating the more immediate and direct forms of experience as marking the limits of every reconstructive process and furnishing the key to its explanation, and although pointing out the continual disintegration and redintegration Of one type Of experience into the other, it has nevertheless treated immediate, satisfactorily work ing experience only incidentally and with reference to the group of prob lems just mentioned; and has made, SO far as I know, no detailed study Of its various aspects and problems. This emphasis is due, no doubt, partly to the inherent difficulty Of analyzing immediate experience, since it functions as a whole and there fore without revealing its constituent elements; partly to the influences under which functional psychology began to take shape as a system; and partly to the newness of the whole method, which is, in fact, only just becoming aware of its full implications, and has not yet had time to state, much less to solve, all its problems. But now, on the one hand, its own achievements are pushing it on to further inquiry into its assumptions, and, on the other hand, certain familiar and frequently discussed kinds of experience are crying for investigation and restatement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.