CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY 599 



While the first result of increased knowledge has been the estab- 

 lishment of a number of sciences say a dozen or a score which 

 have secured proselytes and to a certain extent limited and directed 

 their activities, the further increase of knowledge must break down 

 the artificial limitations. The late emergence of psychology has 

 made easy an elective selection of material. We not only have psy- 

 chologists who are also philosophers, but psychologists who are also 

 physiologists, anatomists, pathologists, zoologists, anthropologists, 

 philologists, sociologists, physicists, or mathematicians. Psychology 

 is and will increasingly become united with professions and arts, 

 with education, medicine, music, painting, and the rest. Even 

 sciences remote from psychology, astronomy, for example, may 

 have sufficient points of contact to occupy the entire time of a 

 specialist. We not only have combinations between the orthodox 

 sciences, but cross-sections through them, which may to advantage 

 occupy the student, and which have full rights to be ranked as 

 sciences. The phenomena of vision, for example, are scattered 

 among tjae sciences of psychology, physics, physiology, anatomy, 

 anthropology, zoology, embryology, pathology, chemistry, mathe- 

 matics, etc.; they are important factors in certain fine and indus- 

 trial arts; they are the basis of one of the most important medical 

 disciplines. Why should not a man be a " visionologist " or " sight- 

 onomer "? When President Hall gives us an original and unique 

 book on adolescence, nothing is gained by attempting to assign it 

 to one of the conventional sciences. The work of Dr. Galton appears 

 to me to be particularly unified, but it does not belong to psycho- 

 logy, nor to any other science. Why not call him an opportunist, 

 or a liberal unionist, or a Galtonist, or, better still, call him no name 

 at all? 



In objecting to an artificial limitation of the field of the psycho- 

 logist, I by no means want to aggrandize his office or to let psycho- 

 logy eat up the other sciences. The student of psychology is limited 

 by the capacity of the human mind and of his own particular mind; 

 he can, on the average, cover a range about as large as that of the 

 student of any other science. If he would gladly get, he would also 

 gladly give. If he is an imperialist who would set his flag on every 

 corner of the earth, he yet tears down no other flag, and welcomes 

 the invasion of his own territory by every science. 



As I claim for psychology the freedom of the universe in its sub- 

 ject-matter, so I believe that every method of science can be used 

 by the psychologist. The two great achievements of science have 

 been the elaboration of the quantitative method, on the one hand, 

 and of the genetic method, on the other. The uniformity of nature 

 and the rationality of things are here presented in their most con- 



