THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY 621 



ment we may again appeal to the rule of individual development. 

 Certain lines of probable advance may thus be discerned. 



(1) The thought of the unity of social content is a great step to- 

 ward the breaking-down of any associational or other "privately 

 conducted" science. The psychology of the future will be social 

 to the core; and its results, we surmise, will be revolutionary in 

 logic, sociology, ethics, esthetics, and religion, the disciplines 

 which are built upon psychology. 



(2) It follows that the position that the private psychic point 

 of view is the only valid one is to grow more and more obsolete, 

 among workers in this field. It will no longer be possible to claim 

 that all truth about mind must be traced in some individual's con- 

 sciousness, and that the laws of the science are to be those of ob- 

 servable psychic continuity alone. Psychic events are intertwined 

 with physical and biological events, and their sequences involve 

 objective as w r ell as subjective terms. The two sciences which will 

 for this reason be brought into vital relation with psychology are 

 physiology and sociology. 



The two lines of development just mentioned are guaranteed by 

 the essentially social and by corollary, unprivate character of 

 our higher reflective processes. 



(3) The genetic point of view will be worked out in a method 

 of research by which genetic science will take its place beside quan- 

 titative science: psychology will become largely genetic or func- 

 tional. The method in the biological sciences brought in by the 

 theory of evolution consists essentially in the tracing-out of genetic 

 sequences; a thing is defined in terms of what it does and becomes 

 and of what it arose from. The anatomy of structure is only a re- 

 stricted and largely descriptive branch of general biology. So 

 psychic processes are to be understood as phases of a continuous 

 function; their meaning is in what they do or become and in what 

 they arise from. The analysis of a cross-section of consciousness is 

 either descriptive, and thus barren of further results, or it is hypo- 

 thetical, and in so far possibly mythological. This is the essential 

 defect, and the dilemma of a "structural" psychology. 1 



The genetic movement is guaranteed by the current demand 

 and need that the dualisms of partial reflection embodied in the 

 older science be overcome. Only as a law of genetic development 

 is realized can the postulates of self-consciousness at this period 

 or that be justified. But the justification of one such set of postu- 

 lates is, in each case, the abrogation of a former set, and the pro- 

 phecy of a later set. The law of the whole series as such it is the 



1 It may be observed that even the association psychology was preferable to 

 the modern attempts to reach a psychic atomism, and from these to construct 

 the mental life; for the law of association deals with concrete actual units, 

 and formulates real psychic happenings. 



