THE UNITY OF MENTAL SCIENCE 583 



psychology because they cannot be answered. The modern psych- 

 ologist, too, can be neither materialist, idealist, positivist, dogma- 

 tist, gnostic or agnostic, or, rather, is at the same time all of these 

 in some way or degree. Such problems have a large and very im- 

 portant place in the history of philosophic thought. Their culture 

 value as disciplines is very great, but they belong to a stage of 

 mentation now passing away and doomed perhaps ultimately to 

 become as iiherwundene Standpunkte, as those of vortexes, the 

 plenum or vacuum, the Plutonic versus the Neptunic theories, 

 have become for science. The ethical bearings of many of these 

 questions once thought so great are rapidly becoming insignificant, 

 but they still bulk large wherever psychologists are dominated 

 by theological interests, or even accept, as far more do, their pro- 

 blems at the hands of metaphysics. Our science is still, like Mil- 

 top's tawny lion, pawing to get free from the soil in which it is 

 just being born. Many text-books and treatises modulate from 

 the latest science to the oldest speculative surds and speak in two 

 alternating registers, while others evaluate new results by their 

 bearings upon antique problems wrongly put in a pre-scientific 

 age, but made venerable and most significant for history by the 

 accretions of the best and most ingenious thought of ages. Thus, 

 the second danger that besets our work is that it is not sufficiently 

 emancipated from the now conventionalized criteria of past sys- 

 tems of thought, and has not subordinated these as it should to 

 be used not as finalities or solutions, but only as empirical data 

 for larger generalizations that transcend them. But if it is the 

 philosophy of philosophy, it comes to many of these problems not 

 to destroy, but fulfill. 



The third source of danger to psychology arises from the theory of 

 knowledge or epistemology. The human soul inherits the result 

 of a vast experience acquired by the race, but innate in the indi- 

 vidual, but the latter cannot validate much of it hi his own re- 

 stricted life. He is so surcharged with paleo-atavistic traces, tend- 

 encies, instincts, from back, perhaps, to the amphioxus or even 

 the amceba, that he often seems to himself to live and move in 

 a world that is both within and without unrealized alien, and afar. 

 What we inherit is so much better organized than what we ac- 

 quire, it is so dominant and, perhaps, so unmodifiable and unac- 

 countable, that the world arid self seem shadowy, and our unre- 

 flecting confidence in these is thus easily shocked out of its poise 

 by Berkeley and Hume till some come to feel that a life so unex- 

 plained is hardly worth living. When, in addition to these pre- 

 disposing causes which for some diatheses may become a neurosis, 

 the thinker leads a pallid, anemic life in academic isolation from 

 the great, throbbing, struggling world, and in the study devotes 



