228 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of connection peculiar to them. It is not a province of physiology; nor does it 

 attempt, as has been mistakenly asserted, to derive or explain the phenomena 

 of the psychical from those of the physical life. We may read this meaning 

 into the phrase " physiological psychology," just as we might interpret " micro- 

 scopical anatomy " to mean a discussion, with illustrations from anatomy, of 

 what has been accomplished by the microscope; but the words should be no 

 more misleading in the one case than they are in the other. As employed in the 

 present work, the adjective " physiological " implies simply that our psychology 

 will avail itself to the full of the means that modern physiology puts at its 

 disposal for the analysis of conscious processes. 5 



But, had lie gone no farther than this, Wundt could scarcely be 

 excepted from the condemnation of his predecessors, or from that under 

 which some of his scholars have fallen. For, plainly, it could be 

 objected that he had omitted the two most remarkable facts of con- 

 sciousness which, stated synoptically, are its intensive or individual 

 centralization, and its extensive development in society. These aspects 

 of the matter tend to get beyond psychological management, as they 

 assuredly raise ultimate philosophical problems. Wundt's high dis- 

 tinction is attributable mainly to his recognition of and attack upon 

 these difficulties. So, his psychology offers a second, and broader, 

 side, set forth, for example, in his excursus entitled " Philosophie und 

 Wissenschaft " ("Essays," 1881), and present as a constructive, pos- 

 sibly a disturbing, element, in his entire purview of the psychological 

 field. For instance, in his " System," the theory of the " growth of 

 mental values " bears precisely upon these questions. " Mental life is, 

 extensively and intensively, governed by a law of growth of values : 

 extensively, inasmuch as the multiplicity of mental developments is 

 always on the increase; intensively, inasmuch as the values which 

 appear in these developments increase in degree." 6 And, on the 

 strictly psychological side, he takes note of the same things as follows : 



We may add that, fortunately for the science, there are other sources of 

 objective psychological knowledge, which become accessible at the very point 

 where the experimental method fails us. These are certain products of the 

 common mental life, in which we may trace the operation of determinate 

 psychical motives; chief among them are language, myth and custom. In part 

 determined by historical conditions, they are also, in part, dependent upon uni- 

 versal psychological laws; and the phenomena, that are referable to these laws 

 form the subject-matter of a special psychological discipline, ethnic psychology. 

 The results of ethnic psychology constitute, at the same time, our chief source 

 of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental proc- 

 esses. In this way, experimental psychology and ethnic psychology form the 

 two principal departments of scientific psychology at large. They are supple- 

 mented by child and animal psychology, which, in conjunction with ethnic 

 psychology, attempt to resolve the problems of psychogenesis. . . . Finally, child 

 psychology and experimental psychology in the narrower sense may be bracketed 



■"'Physiological Psychology," Vol. I., p. 2 (Eng. trans.). 

 6 " System der Phil." (2d ed.), p. 304. 



