Editorial. 389 



of experience without considering the materials which are the neces- 

 sar.y bases of inferences concerning consciousness. 



Although there is a general horror of interpretation among 

 zoologists and students of animal behavior at present, there is 

 some evidence of a reaction against extreme objectivism with its 

 unjustifiable assumptions and self-contradictions, in the writings 

 of such biologists as Jennings, Bohn, Sherrington, Wheeler 

 and Whitman. Robert m. yerkes. 



A comment on ''objective nomenclature. 



Mr. Yerkes' discussion of the methodological problem in the 

 foregoing article suggests the follov^ing questions: (i) Does he 

 not emphasize too sharply the antithesis between the methods em- 

 ployed by the two sciences of nerve physiology and comparative 

 psychology .^ (2) Might he not make his point, which is an 

 important one, and at the same time advance the interests of 

 comparative psychology, by granting more to the advocatesof the 

 objective method than he does } 



All science, we will agree, is study of activity. Comparative 

 psychology, like nerve physiology, is the attempt to describe (and 

 in adequately describing) to explain organic behavior. The 

 phenomena with which comparative psychology deals are iden- 

 tical with those with which nerve physiology deals except that, for 

 purely practical reasons in the convenient division of labor, the lat- 

 ter science stops short in its descriptions and explanations with 

 certain facts and principles which the former science must employ 

 by reason of the wider field which it includes within its scope. 

 There is and can be no antagonism in the methods or points of view 

 of the two sciences, since the one is in principle but the extension of 

 the other; or perhaps it would be better to say that the one pro- 

 ceeds further along the same lines laid down by the other. The 

 two methods are not like parallel lines which never meet — what- 

 ever hope there may be of their .meeting at infinity where all 

 sciences and philosophies merge in the mist and mystery of a 

 completely rationalized universe. They are rather like different 

 stages in a common process of inquiry, their ulterior starting point 

 and goal being determined by a common motive and end, their 

 difference being methodological only, /. e., differing only by reason 

 of the peculiar demands placed upon method by the greater compli- 



