454 BIOLOGY IN RELATION TO OTHER NATURAL SCIENCES. 



die of tlie ])ros(nit century, by investigations * whicli formed part of tlie 

 work done at tliat epoch of discovery, and altlioiigh Prof. Wundt, also 

 a physiologist, has taken a larger share in the more recent develoi)ment 

 of the new stndy, it is chiefly by psychologists that the researches 

 which have given to it its importance as a new discipline have been 

 conducted. 



Although therefore experimental psychology has derived its methods 

 from physical science, the result has been not so much that physiologists 

 have become philosophers as that ])hilosophers have become experi- 

 mental psychologists. In our own universities, in those of America, 

 and still more in those of Germany, psychological students of mature 

 age are, to be found who are willing to place themselves in the dissect- 

 ing room side l)y side with beginners in anatomy, in order to acquire 

 that exact knowledge of the framework of the organism without which 

 no man can understand its working. Those therefore who are appre- 

 hensive lest the regions of mind shoidd be invaded by the hisaniens 

 sapieiitia of the laboratory, may, I think, console themselves with the 

 thought that the invaders are for the most part men who, before they 

 became laboratory workers, had already given their allegiance to phil- 

 osophy; their pur^xtse being not to relin(|uish detinitely, but merely to 

 lay aside for a time the weapons in the use of which they had been 

 trained in order to learn the use of ours. The motive that has encour- 

 aged them has not been any hope of finding au experimental solution 

 of any of the ultimate problems of philosophy, but the conviction that 

 inasmuch as the relation between mental stimuli and the mental pro- 

 cesses which they awaken is of the same order with the relation between 

 every other vital process and its specific determinant, the only hope of 

 ascertaining its nature must lie in the employment of the same methods 

 of comparative measurement which the biologist uses foi' similar pur- 

 poses. Not that there is necessarily anything scientific in mere measure- 

 ment, but that measurement affords the only means by which it can be 

 determined whether or not the same conformity in the relation between 

 stimulus and reaction which we have accepted as the fundamental char- 

 acteristic of life is also to be found in mind, notwithstanding that 

 mental processes have no known physical concomitants. The results 

 of experimental ])sychology tend to sliow that it is .so, and consecjuently 

 that in so far, the i)rocesses in question are as truly functions of organ 

 ism as the contraction of a muscle, or as the changes produced in the 

 retinal pigment l)y light. 



1 will make no attempt even to enumerate the special lines of incjuiry 

 which during the last decade have been conducted with such vigor in 

 all parts of the world, idl of them traceable to the influence of the 

 Leipzig school, l>ut will content myself with saying that the general 



* Weber's researches were published in Wagner's Handwbrterhuch, I think, in 1849. 



