658 EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



regarded as a form of philosophy, depending for its completeness 

 upon metaphysical assumptions and not presenting the results 

 of experimentally determined knowledge. On the other it has 

 been charged that what we term psychology, though admittedly 

 a science, is not a science of mind, but merely a branch of physi- 

 ology. Like a person pulled in opposite directions by two com- 

 panions, if we wrench ourselves free from the grasp of metaphysics 

 on the right, the tug of physiology is in danger of drawing us 

 bodily over to the left. 



Every science in its progress has to face the awkward problem 

 of its own descent. Its ancestors are on its hands. It has arisen 

 from that which in many cases is not merely unlike, but essen- 

 tially repugnant to its own true aims. Its methods have been de- 

 based by charlatanry, its imperfect rationalization of phenomena 

 has been eked out by speculations subsequently discredited as 

 absurd, and its aims have been distorted by an admixture of meta- 

 physical concepts which hamper its progress and cast doubt upon 

 its credentials as a science. Through these stages our knowledge 

 of the configuration and motions of the earth, of the forms and 

 adaptations of life, of the functions of man's will and the relation 

 of human destiny to the processes of the suns has passed. Above 

 all has psychology felt this hereditary incubus in the establish- 

 ment of its methods upon an inductive basis. 



In considering the claim of any system of thought to a place 

 among the sciences, it must be remembered that its standing is 

 not to be determined by the largeness of its results. That a sci- 

 ence is an organized body of knowledge about a specific class of 

 phenomena is a definition which none of us would willingly re- 

 linquish. It is to the system of truth which has resulted from 

 its investigations that the world looks for evidence of the rise of 

 a new science. But there is a more essential aspect to the matter 

 than this. Such a system of knowledge, because progressive, is 

 necessarily incomplete; and all discrimination between its suc- 

 cessive stages is merely relative. It is a science in becoming, as 

 well as in being. If it be worthy of the name at any time, it must 

 in the deepest sense be a science at all times. So long as only the 

 range of facts which it rationalizes is changed, and not its methods 

 and point of view, the scientific character of its work must remain 

 unaffected. The moment of its birth is the instant in which that 

 mode of approach to a problem of knowledge which we call induc- 

 tive method is first applied to its subject-matter. Only the sub- 

 sequent body of knowledge which gathers about it may indeed 

 be said to give substantial reality to the new science, since it alone 

 gives continuity to the study. Yet when we are called upon to 

 say of a given piece of work whether it is scientific or not our judg- 



