584 MENTAL SCIENCE 



himself to passionless contemplation pampered by the second- 

 hand knowledge of life derived from books, it is not strange in a 

 precocious and over-civilized age, with more knowledge forced 

 upon the mind than it can digest, that the veil of Maya sometimes 

 settles fold on fold over the soul till it almost feels the panic of the 

 claustraphobiac and must break out and away to find reality or 

 smother. It feels that, like the Holy Grail, removed from the sight 

 of carnal men, it can be sought only by those purged from all de- 

 filement of the world of sense, but it must be found and quaffed 

 or the soul be lost to truth. For those paranoiac minds sitting thus 

 in prison, whose constitutional malady is aggravated by the doc- 

 trine of the ideality of space, the greatest philosophic delusion of 

 modern times, it is well to have highways of escape opened up out 

 of agnosticism. For many, if not most, too, a touch of it, but not 

 too much of it is, perhaps, a necessary part of the complex initia- 

 tion of youth into its world; but the severer types of this disci- 

 pline seem more suited to senescent than to adolescent men and 

 races. For the psychologist, however, in pursuit of his legitimate 

 vocation, to be liable to be held up at any time to prove that the 

 soul has a brain or a body, that the self or the objects of sense exist, 

 that other people and animals with similar organs to his own have 

 similar subjective states, is just as irrelevant and as paralyzing 

 as it would be for the physicist, chemist, and astronomer, and any 

 old answer makes just as little real practical difference of any con- 

 ceivable kind in the one field as in the other. Yet the need of such 

 a cult and all its symptoms, how they came to arise and how very 

 real they sometimes are, and their forms of documentation in both 

 the Oriental and the modern world, constitute not only a very im- 

 portant, but a fascinating problem for inductive psychology, while 

 the ways of meeting these needs are legitimate and now even press- 

 ing questions of the higher individual pedagogy. 



Finally, as to the field and methods of scientific psychology, 

 the present speaker feels profoundly limitations that prevent him 

 from rising to the height of the great argument for unification so 

 wisely proposed in the plan of this Congress, and can only briefly 

 indicate a view perhaps yet more personal than what has preceded, 

 recognizing that very different ones are held by many if not most 

 of his wiser colleagues. First, no trace of sentiency, even the faintest, 

 down to and perhaps even into the plant world, should be alien 

 to our interest. If in doubt between Wasmann and Forel, on one 

 hand, and the mechanical interpretations of the tropisms and 

 taxies as held by Loeb, Bethe, and Uexkull, we should recall and 

 profit by the fate of Descartes' conception that even the higher 

 animals were only automata. In experimenting on these, under 

 the controlled conditions of the laboratory, we should not neglect 



