THE RENAISSANCE OF PSYCHOLOGY 



that issue — the scientific viewpoint — was long delayed 

 through the occupation of the field by concepts and inter- 

 pretations that to us seem extraneous, irrelevant, crudely 

 speculative, unsupported, and unsound. Their logic seems 

 as alien as their findings. As we go back but a few intel- 

 lectual generations, we seem to be in a foreign land, where 

 our way of thought can find few points of contact and no 

 sense of illumination, no resting place. 



The picture of the mind as we know it to-day is scarcely 

 recognizable; so much is out of focus, so much distorted, 

 so much intruded, so many vital features lacking. An 

 historical retrospect seems like an excursion into a land 

 of errors and phantoms. This may in a measure be true 

 of the antecedents of all science, but applies in larger 

 measure to psychology, because the mind was so open a 

 domain, approachable from so many avenues — a circum- 

 stance which accounts equally for the wide reach of its 

 modern applications. All these accumulations of tradition 

 and obstacles to understanding had to be removed or cor- 

 rected by truer approximations before the heritage that 

 we accept as naturally as steam and electricity and radio 

 came to be ours. The layman of to-day is as familiar with 

 psychology as with physics or chemistry. Man is living 

 in a psychological age; he has developed an intimate 

 interest in interpreting human behavior, as well as the 

 physical resources of the modern world. 



It is worth a moment's delay among the antecedents of 

 psychology to gain a truer sense of the recency and signifi- 

 cance of its establishment. If we go back to Descartes 

 (1596-1650) — that great mind of a great period, who 

 devised analytical geometry, hailed Harvey's discovery 

 of the circulation, and had a high place among the philo- 

 sophers — we find bodily behavior explained by "animal 

 spirits," animals reacting as machines, but human animals 

 behaving by a totally different "rational" nature, in that 



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