Introspections; Mental elements and attributes; Sensationalism

Second strand of the historical background again deals with the sensory qualities and dimensional attributes. Interest focuses upon them as the stuff of which consciousness is made. Before the rise of behaviorism and before the psychology was clearly separated from philosophy the mind was conceived in psychic or phenomenological terms. Consciousness was conceived as something that is existential. The elements thus observed, analyzed, and reported were regarded as the basic constituents of mind; and the laws of attention and association were the forces that selected them and joined them together. By about 1910 Titchener had recognized three types of elements: sensations, images and feeling. They maintained that cognitive processes and perception always involve, in their earlier stages, some imagery. They also pointed out that no sensation exists in consciousness without its attributes.