THE RENAISSANCE OF PSYCHOLOGY 



This biological renaissance determined the advance of 

 psychology. Psychology, as we know it, was impossible 

 before Darwin, not because of the evolution concept alone, 

 but because of the confluence of several rapidly growing 

 streams of knowledge and of method at this period. 



The renaissance of psychology was launched with the 

 impetus of the greater wave of evolution. Leaving that for 

 the moment, we must focus upon the experimental ap- 

 proach; the two have in common the objective attitude; 

 and if we include the naturalistic viewpoint, the prolific 

 fertility of modern psychology is traced to its headwaters. 

 Negatively, experimental psychology is a protest against 

 armchair assumptions and subjective elaborations in the 

 systematic manner of philosophy or the eclectic temper 

 of literature. Positively, it is a reform in logical method, 

 deriving remotely from the Baconian emphasis on induc- 

 tion — though this alone was not sufficient to direct psy- 

 chology into scientific channels. The realistic pursuit, 

 forsaking speculation and clinging close to observation, 

 found a radical expression in the positivist program 

 sponsored by Comte, with its direct influence upon English 

 pragmatic thought. 



That movement has its center in the problem, persistent 

 from the Greek to the Darwinian naturalists, as to how the 

 affairs of body and mind are related and integrated. When 

 Wundt, the first mind to be inspired by the vision of a 

 comprehensive scientific psychology, came to formulate 

 it in a massive volume, the parent of five-foot and fifty- 

 foot shelves of modern psychological texts, he properly 

 called his systematic treatise "Physiological Psychology." 

 He is known as the father of experimental psychology 

 and the founder of the first psychological laboratory 

 (1879). Though the chair he held, true to the older tradi- 

 tion, was titled "philosophy," he followed the clue of 

 the times in focusing upon the physiological approach. 



[61] 



