PSYCHOLOGY 47 



The authors are entirely in the right; their readers are physicians and 

 engineers, and not physiologists and physicists; their subject-matter is 

 held together and unified by a practical aim, and not by an initial point 

 of view; it is unfair to judge them by the standards of science. A text- 

 book of physics or of physiology, on the other hand, is — as we have seen 

 — a transcription of the world of experience from a particular stand- 

 point, which is deliberately adopted at the outset and deliberately main- 

 tained to the end; no item of experience that is not visible from this 

 standpoint can properly get into it; and it is unfair to judge it by the 

 needs and aims of a technology. All human activities have their limi- 

 tations : and if the technologist is less clearly conscious of the restriction 

 laid upon him by his practical end, and the man of science feels more 

 keenly the narrowing of his universe by the scientific point of view, — 

 the rule is certainly not without exceptions; but we may grant the 

 tendency, — that is due partly to the greater outward diversity of the 

 technological career, and partly to the more rigorous training in logic 

 that scientific investigation affords and demands. The technologist 

 never, to be sure, handles experience in its totality, but he deals with 

 individual cases, and so comes nearer to the concrete than his scientific 

 colleague; and he may, moreover, change from the practical to the 

 scientific or the appreciative attitude without any great fear of leaving 

 his last; his interests are thus diversified. The man of science, con- 

 stantly applying the principles of logic, and constantly on his guard 

 against the encroachment of logical theory upon the facts of observa- 

 tion, is forced to be self-critical, and so comes nearer to a true per- 

 spective. 3 



physical and social anthropology and ethnology, from statistics, from general 

 biology, zoology, botany, thremmatology, from psychology and psychophysics, 

 from ethics, economics, sociology, — then he is the more apt to realize from how- 

 many and how various sources his own discipline is sprung. 



3 A good illustration of what is here meant is furnished by the current use 

 of the word ''dynamic," to which attention has been called in the introduction. 

 Occasionally, ' ' dynamic ' ' as opposed to ' ' static ' ' seems to mean simply tem- 

 poral as opposed to spatial, or to imply a longitudinal section of experi- 

 ence as opposed to a cross-section. Ordinarily, however, as the term is used 

 in psychiatry and "applied psychology," it seems to go back to an exploded 

 theory of causation, or even behind causation to animism; it seems to imply a 

 driving power, or motive force, or an interplay of effective powers and forces, 

 such as is wholly unfamiliar to modern science. It has become, so far as the 

 writer can make out, a sort of watchword, expressive of emotion rather than of 

 thought; at any rate, he knows of no attempt to define it. Again, one of our 

 leading psychiatrists warns the "professional psychologist . . . [to] come to 

 the hospital clinic. He must imitate the geologist and leave his academic shades 

 and seek his material for study where it is to be found. It is in pathologic con- 

 ditions of the mind that he will find his true field of research." All honor to 

 the clinic! — but has then the crust of our earth gone moldy, and are all geolog- 

 ical formations diseased? 



