RELATIONS OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 667 



will be modified in accordance with the nature of the influence 

 which these factors have exerted. This change of view is repre- 

 sented in the recognition among dependents and criminals of an 

 aberrant physical type. It is represented in the sliding scale of 

 condemnation attaching to the same fault under different con- 

 ditions and by different individuals. It is represented in the sub- 

 stitution of the concept of an orderly and explicable process in the 

 religious development of the individual and of humanity for that 

 of the miraculous and inscrutable working of a divine spirit. The 

 experimental study of the relations of consciousness to its environing 

 conditions has removed these provinces of action and judgment 

 from the region of mysticism and supernaturalism, and made them 

 part of the unitary system of forces which finds expression in the 

 orderly development of the human life. 



I do not attempt, nor desire, to touch the question of the essential 

 character of moral law and the source and implications of our re- 

 ligious life, but simply to point out that these activities, which are 

 part of that inner personal experience which no science has succeeded 

 or can succeed in dissecting, are, like all our expressions of will, 

 uniformly manifested under conditions which are accessible to 

 scientific treatment, and that whatever analysis can be made, for 

 example, of the economic activities of man, the same may be carried 

 out in regard to his moral and religious life. And this working-out 

 of the naturalistic sciences of ethics and religion has been done 

 through a psychological study of the correlations which connect 

 their variations with systematic changes in the individual and his 

 environment. 



With the historical sciences the case stands differently. The 

 study of history is an expression of our uncontrollable sympathy 

 with all that touches the self which makes human experience at 

 large the reflection of our own personal life. This characterization 

 throws history into the one group with fiction and the drama as 

 objects of interest, and seems to do violence to truth. The work 

 of the biographer and historian is commonly discriminated from 

 that of the novelist and poet, by reason of a difference in the points 

 of view from which they regard a common material, namely, the 

 living experiences of men and nations. The historian does not aim 

 at a dramatic reincarnation of persons and situations; he under- 

 takes a systematic analysis of human motives in order that the 

 process of life may be made intelligible. The distinction is a real 

 and important one. All history, as it reappears in the individual 

 imagination, is transmuted into epic poetry, endowed, with a dom- 

 inant note and a dramatic unity which the original experience in- 

 evitably lacked. This bias, which is inseparable from personal 

 consciousness, the historian sets himself to correct by an exhaustive 



