Edward Bradford Titchener, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Psychology is a science, and a science begins with analysis. As the physiologist resolves the body into organs, tissues, and cells, so the psychologist must resolve the mind into its constituent processes and find the elements of which all consciousness is composed.1 I hold that this analysis, carried through, yields three kinds of element and no more: sensations, the elements of perception; images, the elements of ideas; and affections, the elements of feeling — each describable by its attributes of quality, intensity, duration, and clearness.
The most elaborate thought, the richest emotion, the subtlest perception is, when analysed, a complex of these elements combined under law. To describe this structure — to give the anatomy of the mind, the catalogue of its elements and the laws of their connection — is the first and fundamental task of our science, prior to every question of use or purpose.
One must know what mind is before one asks what mind is for; and what mind is, is a structure of elementary conscious processes, to be laid bare by analysis exactly as the structures of the body are laid bare by the anatomist's knife.234
These simple processes are called mental elements. They are very numerous: there are probably some 50,000 of them: but they may all be grouped into two great classes, as sensations and affections. Reversing our order, then, we may build up mind as The up- follows. We set out with the two classes of elementary bmidmgof ^ mind. processes, sensations (red, cold, bitter) and affections (pleasant, unpleasant).A Primer of Psychology
The science of psychology is still in the making; and, until it is rounded out and finished off, no final list of the mental elements can possibly be drawn up. We must make a decision in the matter; but we must not be dogmatic: we must stand ready to modify our decision, if the results of future research prove us to be wrong.A Text-book of Psychology, pp. 47–48
The natural consciousness, indeed, differs precisely as the time which we speak of as * the present time ' differs. It is * now ' for the whole hour that we spend in the dentist's chair, or for the whole afternoon that we devote to the reading of a new book. For the runner who is awaiting the signal to start, it is * now ' only for two or three seconds.An Outline of Psychology, pp. 12–13
We have just learned, however, that there is a psychology of the lower animals, possibly even of plants; and we must therefore say that we were speaking in 2 of the subject-matter of human psychology. This is the psychology that will occupy us in the present book. Let us now see what our actual task is.A Beginners Psychology
Structuralism was the first systematic experimental psychology in America and set the discipline's standards of laboratory rigor, but the system itself did not survive its founder. The elementarist program was attacked from every side: functionalism held that mind must be studied for its uses, not merely dissected; Gestalt psychology argued that conscious wholes are prior to and not built from elements (the melody is not the sum of its notes); behaviorism rejected the analysis of consciousness altogether. The cataloguing of sensory elements came to seem sterile and endless, and the exclusion of function, development, and meaning unduly narrow. What endures is the insistence on rigorous description and control and the seriousness about the structure of experience that a modern, differently-founded science of consciousness has had to recover.