THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY. 35 



the misfortune of this important addition to psychology, that it shows 

 that previous workers in this field of inquiry have at times been labor- 

 ing in the dark to solve problems like in kind with the famous diffi- 

 culty of accounting for the supposed fact that the weight of a vessel 

 of water is not increased by the addition of a live fish. For instance, 

 should Mr. Spencer be right, the celebrated theory of the Will, elabo- 

 rated by Prof. Baiu, the able representative of the individual-experience 

 psychology, becomes a highly-ingenious account of what does not 

 happen. Thus, the new doctrine can be accepted only at the expense 

 of giving up much of what has hitherto passed for mental science. 



The following sentences will serve to indicate Mr. Spencer's posi- 

 tion : " The ability to coordinate impressions, and to perform the ap- 

 propriate actions, always implies the preexistence of certain nerves 

 arranged in a certain way. What is the meaning of the human brain ? 

 It is that the many establisJied relations among its parts stand for so 

 many established relations among the psychical changes. Each of the 

 constant connections among the fibres of the cerebral masses answers 

 to some constant connection of phenomena in the experiences of the 

 race. . . . Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the 

 experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolu- 

 tion which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous 

 system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily 

 growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to 

 assume the adult form. . . . The doctrine that all the desires, all the 

 sentiments, are generated by the experiences of the individual, is so 

 glaringly at variance with facts, that I cannot but wonder how any 

 one should ever have entertained it." The circumstances which ac- 

 count for the existence of the individual-experience psychology, and 

 which enable it still to hold out as a rival of the more advanced form 

 that Mr. Spencer has given to the science, are these : (1) the imma- 

 turity of the human infant at birth ; (2) the lack of precise knowledge 

 with regard to the mental peculiarities of the lower animals ; (3) the 

 still popular notion that the human mind does not resemble the mental 

 constitution of the animals ; that it is of a different order. Of course 

 this last is nowadays little more than a popular superstition, neverthe- 

 less it can be taken advantage of: and an argument to the effect that 

 the mental operations of the animals are, to all appearance, so very 

 different from the workings of the human mind that they can supply 

 nothing more than a worthless, if not a misleading analogy, has a 

 very specious and scientific look about it in the eyes of those who are 

 not very well acquainted with the subject. Our ignorance of animal 

 psychology may be still more boldly drawn on in defence of the theory 

 under consideration. With a hyper-scientific caution, its advocates 

 refuse to take into account any thing (incompatible with their theory) 

 cencerning any one species of animal that has not been proved by a 

 very overwhelmingly large number of very accurate observations. And 



