Hall: Psychology and the War ' 



443 



ards, and, indeed in about every 

 domain of ps^^chology (unless we except 

 psychiatry, where most work worth 

 while that has been done has been 

 inspired either by Kraepelin or more 

 lately by Freud\ I believe we are quite 

 ready to meet this call in the field of 

 both pure and applied psychology, 

 provided only we escape the obsession 

 of finality in either method or result 

 and realize that psychology is just 

 beginning, the best things are yet to 

 be found out, and that its difficulties 

 and obscurities are the twilight of dawn 

 and not that of evening. 



2. Another effect of the war upon 

 psychology that now seems probable is 

 to lay stress upon applied as distinct 

 from pure aspects of research. For 

 two and a half years, practically all the 

 leaders in most of the physical sciences, 

 particularly physics and chemistry, have 

 ceased to advance their science as such 

 and have been absorbed in making it 

 immediately serviceable; while even 

 in the most humanistic fields culture 

 has yielded to Kultur. The criterion of 

 values in science is now what it can do 

 pragmatically, in the Vaihinger sense. 

 Talent of the order of Edison or Burbank 

 has taken precedence over that of men 

 like Helmholtz and Weismann, and the 

 work of the latter is transvalued by 

 the test of utility. The war has given 

 the world its greatest lesson in scientific 

 efficiency. Just as Russia in the war 

 with Japan did not begin to realize how 

 far the latter country had moulted all its 

 pre-Meiji, and indeed all liberal culture, 

 and focussed its entire energy upon 

 practical efficiency, so none of the 

 Entente Allies, least of all England, 

 realized how far Germany had gone in 

 casting off the culture of half a century 

 ago, and in almost a single generation 

 acquiring a new soul that made it, 

 instead of the least, the most hard- 

 headed, practically effective nation the 

 world has ever seen, with hardly a 

 vestige of the old, speculative, senti- 

 mental traits of the days before 1870. 

 As pure chemistry failed to appreciate 

 the value of the formula for making 

 nitrate, which Germany had secretly 

 bought from its Norse discoverer, and 

 which enabled it to produce 300,000 tons 



of ammunitions during the first year of 

 the war, at one-third its cost to the 

 AUies, so its tests of the senses, motility, 

 fatigue; its establishment of distinct 

 digestive, respiratory, muscular, and 

 nervous types; its temibility tests, 

 which eliminate from the ranks both on 

 donning the uniform and after every 

 wound, thereby greatly reducing lia- 

 bilities to panic; the French tests and 

 assignment of men to infantry, cavalry, 

 artillery, aviation corps, etc., according 

 to the standard types of McAuliffe, 

 Segaud, Thooris and vSorel, have shown 

 how immediately serviceable psychology 

 could be made in a new field. Already 

 enough of the carefully guarded military 

 secrets of these tests for specific lines of 

 military service have leaked out to 

 suggest why the German and French 

 armies aie so much more effectively 

 organized than the English and Russian, 

 and to show that applied psychology can 

 render the most valuable service. We 

 see with mingled admiration and dismay 

 to what lengths Germany will go in 

 applying all the latest knowledge in 

 every field, not only in industry, but 

 municipal and social organization, and 

 even in tugtnics, in ways often far 

 beyond the reaches of the old morality. 



THE STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE 



Corporation schools, which here in 

 the last four ^^ears have come to repre- 

 sent the advanced line of vocational 

 discrimination and guidance, have al- 

 ready demanded of psychology vastly 

 more knowledge of character and its 

 traits than it has yet attained; and 

 this has led, as we all know, to very 

 many tables of human qualities, that 

 are, some more, some less scientific, 

 and premature, so that ■ we can only 

 v^ery imperfectly and tentatively answer 

 all the questions that business is now 

 putting to us. So the war has still more 

 urgently called upon psychology to 

 do things it was not ready for, which 

 had to be done extemporarily and as 

 best they could by intuition. In both 

 fields the call is so loud and insistent 

 that it seems to me every psychologist 

 should be able to give some reason if he 

 does not do what in him lies to a 

 better knowledge of man and life under 



