594 PSYCHOLOGY 



the deficiencies of his ceremonial verses by reflecting on the honor 

 of being permitted to write them. 



The concept of a science is an abstraction from an abstraction. 

 The concrete fact is the individual experience of each of us. Cer- 

 tain parts of this experience are forcibly and artificially separated 

 from the rest and become my science of psychology, your science 

 of psychology, his science of psychology. From all these individual 

 sciences, shifting not only from person to person, but also from 

 day to day, there arises by a kind of natural selection a quasi- 

 objective science of psychology. In a well-bred science, such as 

 chemistry, the conventions have become standardized; the dogmas 

 impose themselves on the neophyte. But projectiles as small as 

 ions or electrons break up the idols, and the map of science is re- 

 modeled more quickly and completely than the map of Asia. 



Psychology has never had a well-defined territory. As states 

 of consciousness appear to be less stable and definite than the 

 objects of the material world, so the science of psychology is more 

 shifting in its contents and more uncertain in its methods than 

 any physical science. We are told, indeed, in our introductory text- 

 books that psychology is the science of mind, and that mind and 

 matter are the most diverse things in the world. It is said, further, 

 that psychology is a positive science, and is thus clearly distin- 

 guished from the normative disciplines, such as logic and ethics. 

 Words are also used to set psychology off from sociology, history, 

 philology, and the rest. But while all these verbal definitions may 

 satisfy the college sophomore, they must be perplexing to the can- 

 didate for the doctor's degree. 



The distinction between mind and matter is one of the last words 

 of a philosophy which does not yet exist, rather than an axiom of 

 every-day experience on which preliminary definitions may be 

 based. We cannot rest satisfied with an empirical psychology in 

 which the distinction is self-evident, an epistemology in which it 

 is explained, and a metaphysics in which it disappears. It may be 

 that we follow Descartes rather than Aristotle in our psychology, 

 not so much from the needs of the science itself as from the de- 

 mands of the church, on the one hand, and of physical science, 

 on the other. The church required souls that might be saved or 

 damned; physics wanted a world independent of individual per- 

 ception, and as the methods of exact science were extended to 

 the human body, it became a part of the physical system. 



To us who have been brought up in the orthodox tradition, the 

 views of some of those who have passed from natural science to 

 metaphysics seem decidedly naive. Thus Mach entitles the con- 

 cluding section of his Science of Mechanics, "The Relations of Mech- 

 anics to Physiology," when he is discussing not the question as to 



