MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 143 



The hinnan being of today has been molded by the stress and strain of 

 half a million years of ancestry, and no longer appeals to us as a creature — 

 in the terms of pre-evolutionary psychology — fresh from the hands of God. 

 Instead of being a new creation, the little child is the oldest of all men, com- 

 bining in his potencies the largest amount of organized experience. Such 

 a conception was utterly imj^ossible to a pre-evolutionary psychologist, 

 and even today, many psychologists tarred with the metaphysical stick, 

 although honestlv believing themselves evolutionists, are unable to attain 

 it. 



Related to the conception just mentioned, is the new attitude toward 

 moral and mental delinc^uents. No longer do we regard criminals as children 

 of the devil, and an idiot as one afflicted of God, but we see in them the result 

 of an atavistic tendency which leads man back into the seas and swamps 

 of a paleo-psychic age. Children are mentally and morally irresponsible, 

 but this expression is itself an archaism from the metaphysical psychology 

 of the ante-diluvian period. Irresponsibility is as natural and as inevitable 

 to children as responsibility is to a grown-up. Children need to grow, and 

 it is the duty of a philosopher and a philanthro])ist to furnish them suitable 

 conditions for growth. Here we find in evolutionary psychology a justi- 

 fication for education — universal, thorough, all-pervading education — that 

 it was impossible to discover in the ]xsychology of the past. It was impossible 

 to conceive of a science of education in terms of the old psychology. For 

 education, the new psychology derived from Evolution, is full of promise 

 and hope of fulfillment. A science of education is possible since Darwin 

 wrote. 



Employing the Darwinian j^rinciple of Natural Selection, we have in 

 evolutionary psychology an ex})lanation of the mental differences between 

 men and women. Every mental characteristic is now or has been in the 

 recent past, an advantage to the individual, to the community, or to the 

 race which exhibits it. As a result, we shall find that the mental processes 

 of men and women differ in exactly the degree that the physical and 

 sociological functions differed in the development of the human race. No 

 possibility of attaining such a conception presented itself to the metaphysical 

 psychologist who saw in the human body only the instrument of a meta- 

 physical entity which he called mind. 



Evolution has compelled psychology to become genetic and functional 

 instead of descriptive and (most inappropriate of all adjectives) rational. 

 There is scarcely a more irrational thing known than rational psychology. 

 Psychological facts find their explanation in antecedent physiological con- 

 ditions. Until this principle has been adopted as the foundation for all 

 psychical research, no progress is possible. Whether we regard the psychical 

 as the product and the result of the physical, as a function of the nervous 

 organism, or whether with Wundt we consider the doctrine of jjsycho-physical 

 parallelism as an all-sufficient statement of the relation existing l^etween 

 mind antl l^ody, progress in psychology is possible only by assuming that 

 mind and body constitute an inseparable unity, subject to the same evolu- 

 tionary laws, and originating in the same antecedent condition. The real 

 nature of the mind, the thing in itself, does not enter into any scientific 

 conception of psychology, and may very properly be left out of consideration 

 until more is known about the real nature of mental processes and their 

 relation to each other. 



Evolution has producetl such an effect upon ])sychology that at present, 

 child psychology — mental ontogeny — constitutes its most promising depart- 



