2S POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



clinical investigator of abnormal conditions in the variegated and little 

 understood field of the so-called psychic automatisms, obsessions, hys- 

 teria, ' multiple personality," hypnotism, etc., whose penetrating anal- 

 yses and fertile hypotheses have done much to bring unity and order 

 into the chaos of phenomena presented. Dr. Morton Prince, an exceed- 

 ingly clever Boston alienist, known also as a philosopher, offered an 

 interesting array of facts from the field of the subconscious, which he 

 subjected to an illuminating analysis. This section was particularly 

 fortunate in having for its secretary an eminent alienist who has 

 brought the methods and results of neurology and pathological anat- 

 omy, of physiology and psychology, together with clinical observation, 

 to bear on a truly biological investigation of insanity — Dr. Adolf 

 Meyer, of the New York State Pathological Institute. 



One of the most interesting sessions was that for experimental 

 psychology, in which a fundamental question of definition — far- 

 reaching in its consequences for psychological research — was brought 

 to a sharp issue in a fruitfully polemical address by Professor E. B. 

 Titchener, Cornell's learned and thorough experimental psychologist, 

 who has made a profound impression, not only upon a loyal group of 

 students, but among psychologists everywhere, by reason of the dis- 

 tinctive point of view to which he has consistently adhered, no less 

 than for the contagious enthusiasm of his devotion to the ideals of the 

 experimental method. Titchener, after a masterly review of the 

 present needs of experimental psychology, felt obliged to insist in 

 sober earnest that psychology is in essence introspective, that intro- 

 spection should be at the core of every psychological experiment, and 

 that only those investigators who are concerned directly with con- 

 scious processes are properly psychologists at all, although it was 

 conceded that much useful work — useful even for psychology sensu 

 siricto — might be done by those who approach the subject more ob- 

 jectively, in the spirit of physiology or of biology, or, on the other side, 

 from the standpoint of the theory of knowledge. 



The interest attaching to the particular form which the discussion 

 took before the experimental psychologists was enhanced by the fact 

 that other psychologists had already, in their divisional and depart- 

 mental addresses, favored the congress with their respective psycho- 

 logical creeds. For Hall, introspection was an almost anomalous by- 

 product of evolution, for Cattell, only one of the methods of psychology. 

 If Hall defined his science in terms of his general philosophy or Welt- 

 anschauung, and Titchener in terms of its most distinctive feature, 

 Cattell may be said to have denned it inductively, in terms of the con- 

 crete interests of working psychologists as measured by their output. 

 His was both a reasoned plea for a deliberate eclecticism in research, 

 pending the adjustment of philosophical difficulties not easily ban- 

 ished, and a defense of a frank opportunism which has proved its 

 usefulness. Ward's interests are apparently antipodal to Hall's. He 



