142 ELEVENTH REPORT, 



weight than scientific demonstration, and personal prejudice i)roduces 

 unshakable conviction. 



Besides the fear that an e"\^olutionary psychology will demolish the 

 doctrine of a supernatural soul, psychology has until now failed to escape 

 from the domination of metaphysical philosophers. It is still treated 

 as a department of ]ihilosophy rather than a natural science. Meta- 

 physicians are i:)ractically untouched l\v an evolutionary philosophy. 

 The metaphysical gods that are set up and worshiped antedate the evolu- 

 tionary era, and the founder of evolution himself is drummed out of the 

 philosophical camp. As a result, we find ps3^chology scarcely as yet escaped 

 irom the philosoi)hical verbiage which for centuries kept it in a condition 

 approximating i)erilously near to asphyxia, for, in the words of Saleeby, 

 "the principal bequest that metaphysicians have left to psychology is a 

 heritage of concatenated words." The followers of Kant and Hegel and 

 Plato have, u]) to the present, written the psychologies and dictated the 

 officers of the i)sychological hierarchy. The disciples of Darwin and Spencer 

 have, likewise up to the present, neither written the psychologies nor devoted 

 themselves to the development of the subject; instead, as it has been promul- 

 gated by metaphysical philosophers, they have experienced a heartfelt 

 contempt for its conclusions. 



Instead of following the lead of Darwin and Spencer, and basing psychology 

 upon the principle which is the essential element in Darwinism, that every 

 mental characteristic is either now, or has been in the recent past, advanta- 

 geous to the individual or to the species, ])sychologists generally have failed 

 to see its application and have plodded along as if Darwin had never lived 

 and laid out new laws for the biological kingdom. They have failed to 

 see the significance of sleep as a self preserving character; of pain as a benefi- 

 cent advantage to the race and to the individual; of spontaneous attention 

 as an essential means of adjustment; of the necessary classification of feelings 

 into self-preserving, community-preserving and race-per])etuating, with 

 their expression intrepreted as either a useful action or an accidental circum- 

 stance. They haA^e made of consciousness an all-pervading condition of 

 mental life, instead of an accidental concomitant, or an epiphenomenon, 

 as Huxley called it. 



Notwithstanding this delay in apjiropriating to itself some of the life- 

 giving essence of evolution, psychology has experienced some of the trans- 

 forming influence that has touched other sciences. Especially is this true 

 in the latest years. It is now possible to say, as Mr. Buchner does in a recent 

 mimber of the Psj^chological Bulletin, that "the past year's work is charac- 

 terized by a number of contributions of widely divergent range, bringing the 

 general hypothesis of Evolution closer to the problems of psychology and 

 taking the vantage points of the science over into the present needs of the 

 theory." There is evidence that henceforward, evolutionary conceptions 

 will exercise greater influence in psychology than they have done in the past. 

 It is well, even now, to gather up the evolutionary ideas that have found 

 a place in ]5sychology as a view point foi* a prospect into the future. 



Evolutionary concei:)tions have taught us to interpret mental habits, 

 tastes, preferences and feelings, as well as emotional expression by means 

 of the ancestral life that human beings and pre-human progenitors have 

 lived. Instinctive fears, ideas that have been called intuitive, successive 

 appearances of well-marked stages in mental life that have their counterparts 

 in physical growth, each with its own series of tastes, activities and aspira- 

 tions, can be interpreted only in terms that evolution has given us. 



