38o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



FKEDEEIC MYERS'S SERVICE TO PSYCHOLOGY.* 



By professor WILLIAM JAMES, 



HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 



/^N this memorial occasion it is from English hearts and tongues 

 ^-^ belonging, as I never had the privilege of belonging, to the 

 immediate environment of our lamented President, that discourse of 

 him as a man and as a friend must come. It is for those who partici- 

 pated in the endless drudgery of his labors for our Society to tell of 

 the high powers he showed there; and it is for those who have some- 

 thing of his burning interest in the problem of our human destiny to 

 estimate his success in throwing a little more light into its dark 

 recesses. To me it has been deemed best to assign a colder task. 

 Frederic Myers was a psychologist who worked upon lines hardly ad- 

 mitted by the more academic branch of the profession to be legitimate ; 

 and as for some years I bore the title of 'Professor of Psychology,' the 

 suggestion has been made (and by me gladly welcomed) that I should 

 spend my portion of this hour in defining the exact place and rank 

 which we must accord to him as a cultivator and promoter of the 

 science of the mind. 



Brought up entirely upon literature and history, and interested at 

 first in poetry and religion chiefly; never by nature a philosopher 

 in the technical sense of a man forced to pursue consistency among 

 concepts for the mere love of the logical occupation; not crammed 

 with science at college, or trained to scientific method by any passage 

 through a laboratory; Myers had as it were to re-create his per- 

 sonality before he became the wary critic of evidence, the skilful 

 handler of hypothesis, the learned neurologist and omnivorous reader 

 of biological and cosmological matter, with whom in later years we 

 were acquainted. The transformation came about because he needed 

 to be all these things in order to work successfully at the problem 

 that lay near his heart; and the ardor of his will and the richness 

 of his intellect are proved by the success with which he underwent so 

 unusual a transformation. 



The problem, as you know, was that of seeking evidence for human 

 immortality. His contributions to psychology were incidental to that 

 research, and would probably never have been made had he not 

 entered on it. But they have a value for science entirely inde- 



* From the 'Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.' 



