388 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



communicating ideal wisdom — in short, the whole classic platonizing 

 Sunday-school conception. Failing to get that sort of thing when it 

 listens to reports about mediums, it denies that there can be anything. 

 Myers approaches the subject with no such a priori requirement. If he 

 finds any ppsitive indication of 'spirits/ he records it, whatever it may 

 be, and is willing to fit his conception to the facts, however grotesque 

 the latter may appear, rather than to blot out the facts to suit his con- 

 ception. But, as was long ago said by our collaborator, Mr. Canning 

 Schiller, in words more effective than any I can write, if any con- 

 ception should be blotted out by serious lovers of nature, it surely 

 ought to be the classic academic Sunday-school conception. If any- 

 thing is i^/ilikely in a world like this, it is that the next adjacent thing 

 to the mere surface-show of our experience should be the realm of 

 eternal essences, of platonic ideas, of crystal battlements, of absolute 

 significance. But whether they be animists or associationists, a 

 supposition something like this is still the assumption of our usual 

 psychologists. It comes from their being for the most part philoso- 

 phers in the technical sense, and from their showing the weakness 

 of that profession for logical abstractions. Myers was primarily a 

 lover of life and not of abstractions. He loved human life, human 

 persons, and their peculiarities. So he could easily admit the possi- 

 bility of level beyond level of perfectly concrete experience, all 'queer 

 and cactus-like' though it might be, before we touch the absolute, or 

 reach the eternal essences. 



Behind the minute anatomists and the physiologists, with their 

 metallic instruments, there have always stood the out-door naturalists 

 with their eyes and love of concrete nature. The former call the 

 latter superficial, but there is something wrong about your laboratory- 

 biologist who has no s}Tnpathy with living animals. In psychology 

 there is a similar distinction. Some psychologists are fascinated by the 

 varieties of mind in living action, others by the dissecting out, whether 

 by logical analysis or by brass instruments, of whatever elementary 

 mental processes may be there. Myers must decidedly be placed in the 

 former class, though his powerful use of analogy enabled him also to do 

 work after the fashion of the latter. He loved human nature as Cuvier 

 and Agassiz loved animal nature; in his view, as in their view, the 

 subject formed a vast living picture. Whether his name will have in 

 psychology as honorable a place as their names have gained in the 

 sister science, will depend on whether future inquirers shall adopt or 

 reject his theories; and the rapidity with which their decision shapes 

 itself will depend largely on the vigor with which this Society continues 

 its labor in his absence. It is at any rate a possibility, and I am dis- 

 posed to think it a probability, that Frederic Myers will always be re- 

 membered in psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of 



