582 MENTAL SCIENCE 



the end of science, as well as the only real essence of mind, is service? 

 Thus the quest of absolute reality must always end in the solipsistic 

 involucre, which is only a new definition of zero, and pure thought 

 purged of will, feeling, and sense cannot be an object of psychological 

 study, for it does not exist. 



Mathematics, which is a formulation of the properties of time 

 and space in the sensory, applies at most only to motion and force 

 in time and space, and its objects are at the bottom, where those 

 of psychology are at the top of the scale of evolution and complex- 

 ity. From Pythagoras down to Herbart, Fechner, the hedonistic 

 calculus in ethics which the vilest wretch may master without 

 feeling the faintest impulsion to virtue, the Boolean and even com- 

 mon deductive logic which never yet discovered anything, and, 

 indeed, I think, every attempted application of mathematics to 

 psychology, save only for -the simple algebraic or other treatment 

 of statistical data, have later proved an illusion, if not a mere affect- 

 ation; and we owe to-day no more to any concept susceptible of 

 mathematical formulation than modern physiology does to the 

 old iatric school that so elaborately treated the bones as levers, 

 the muscles as pulleys, circulation as hydrodynamics, digestion 

 as trituration, and insisted, as Plato did for philosophy, that geo- 

 metry was the best preparation for the study of medicine. Per- 

 haps no two types of mind have less in common than the mathe- 

 matical and the psychological, or help each other less and may 

 hurt each other more. The former has given us hosts of defunct 

 definitions, categories, and dogmas, and has constructed world- 

 bestriding systems by concatenations of the high a priori kind in 

 a way that must raise the query in every candid and impartial 

 mind whether in the field of mind the precept " truth for truth's 

 sake" is not as dangerous as the dictum "art for art's sake" has 

 proven in its, and whether, beside the old injunction " physics, be- 

 ware of metaphysics," we should not erect the warning "psychology, 

 beware of mathematics," and make due purgation of both its 

 methods and its ideals. 



Thus, the first and, perhaps, the chief danger to psychology as 

 a science to-day seems to me to be its tendency, as by an iron law, 

 to gravitate to methods that are too abstract, deductive, specula- 

 tive, and effectively exact. Other sciences long since threw off the 

 influence of the old systems, many of which had dominated them, 

 but psychology is still permeated by them. It still feels the charm 

 of the old insolubilities of ultimate reality, of the relation of mind 

 and body, parallelism or interaction, the primacy of feeling or 

 somatic changes, and is dominated more than it knows by inter- 

 ests in the soul's future, by teleology, freedom versus necessity. 

 all of which, so far as we see, can never be problems of scientific 



