THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN SOUL 237 



mind between man and the higher animals is certainly one of 

 degree and not of kind." (C/. op. cit., chs. III-V.) Haeckel, 

 Huxley, and Clifford attained to equal proficiency in the sport. 

 Subsequent philosophers parroted their bold metaphors and 

 smart aphorisms, and the game went on merrily till the close 

 of the century. Then a badly needed reaction set in under the 

 auspices of Wundt, Lloyd Morgan, and Thorndike, who in- 

 sisted on abandoning this naive impressionism in favor of more 

 critical methods. 



In his ^'Vorlesungen liber die Menschen und Tierseele" (cf. 

 2nd ed., p. 370), Wundt proclaims his rupture with the impres- 

 sionistic school in the following terms: "The one great defect 

 of this popular psychology is that it does not take mental 

 processes for what they show themselves to be to a direct and 

 unprejudiced view, but imports into them the reflections of 

 the observer about them. The necessary consequence for ani- 

 mal psychology is that the mental actions of animals, from the 

 lowest to the highest, are interpreted as acts of the under- 

 standing. If any vital manifestation of the organism is capa- 

 ble of possible derivation from a series of reflections and 

 inferences, that is taken as sufiicient proof that these reflec- 

 tions and inferences actually led up to it. And, indeed, in the 

 absence of a careful analysis of our subjective perceptions we 

 can hardly avoid this conclusion. Logical reflection is the 

 logical process most familiar to us, because we discover its 

 presence when we think about any object whatsoever. So 

 that for popular psychology mental life in general is dissolved 

 in the medium of logical reflection. The question whether 

 there are not perhaps other mental processes of a simpler 

 nature is not asked at all, for the one reason that whenever 

 self-observation is required, it discovers this reflective process 

 in the human consciousness. The same idea is applied to feel- 

 ings, impulses, and voluntary actions which are regarded, if 

 not as acts of intelligence, still as effective states which belong 

 to the intellectual sphere. 



"This mistake, then, springs from ignorance of exact psycho- 



