FREDERIC MYERS. 381 



pendent of the light they shed upon that problem; and it is quite 

 apart from it that I shall venture to consider them. 



If we look at the history of mental science we are immediately 

 struck by diverse tendencies among its several cultivators, the conse- 

 quence being a certain opposition of schools and some repugnance 

 among their disciples. Apart from the great contrasts between minds 

 that are teleological or biological and minds that are mechanical, be- 

 tween the animists and the associationists in psychology, there is the en- 

 tirely different contrast between what I will call the classic-academic 

 and the romantic type of imagination. The former has a fondness for 

 clean pure lines and noble simplicity in its constructions. It explains 

 things by as few principles as possible and is intolerant of either 

 nondescript facts or clumsy formulas. The facts must lie in a neat 

 assemblage, and the psychologist must be enabled to cover them and 

 'tuck them in' as safely under his system as a mother tucks her babe in 

 under the down coverlet on a winter night. Until quite recently all 

 psychology, whether animistic or associationistic, was written on 

 classic-academic lines. The consequence was that the human mind, as 

 it is figured in this literature, was largely an abstraction. Its normal 

 adult traits were recognized. A sort of sunlit terrace was exhibited on 

 which it took its exercise. But where that terrace stopped, the mind 

 stopped; and there was nothing farther left to tell of in this kind of 

 philosophy but the brain and the other physical facts of nature on the 

 one hand, and the absolute metaphysical ground of the universe on the 

 other. 



But of late years the terrace has been overrun by romantic im- 

 provers, and to pass to their work is like going from classic to 

 Gothic architecture, where few outlines are pure and where uncouth 

 forms lurk in the shadows. A mass of mental phenomena are now seen 

 in the shrubbery beyond the parapet. Fantastic, ignoble, hardly 

 human, or frankly non-human are some of these new candidates for 

 psychological description. The menagerie and the madhouse, the 

 nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their 

 material. The world of mind is shown as something infinitely more 

 complex than was suspected ; and whatever beauties it may still possess, 

 it has lost at any rate the beauty of academic neatness. 



But despite the triumph of romanticism, psychologists as a rule 

 have still some lingering prejudice in favor of the nobler simplicities. 

 Moreover there are social prejudices which scientific men themselves 

 obey. The word 'h3^pnotism' has been trailed about in the newspapers 

 so that even we ourselves rather wince at it, and avoid occasions of its 

 use. 'Mesmerism,' 'clairvoyance,' 'medium' — Jiorrescimus referentes! — 

 and with all these things, infected by their previous mystery-mongering 

 discoverers, even our best friends had rather avoid complicity. For 



