LIMITS OF COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY 717 



The foregoing pages have attempted to vindicate the existence 

 of genetic psychology and to outline briefly both its scope and its 

 limits. It will be necessary to discuss at greater length the second 

 topic of this paper. 



II. The Limits of Comparative Psychology 



The bare existence of comparative psychology is nowadays 

 called in question by no one. All psychologists admit that babies, 

 primitive men, and some animals are conscious, and consequently 

 grant the need of a science to study these forms of consciousness. 

 The limits of comparative psychology are simply, therefore, limits 

 in the application of its indirect method. Its initial problem may 

 be formulated thus: what classes of animals and what stages of 

 child-life and what levels of primitive life are conscious? To the 

 consideration of this question, the remainder of this paper is chiefly 

 devoted. For lack of time, the problems of ethnic psychology will 

 be utterly neglected, and the main stress will fall on the facts of 

 animal consciousness. The analysis of the consciousness of animals 

 will be incidentally undertaken. 



To determine what sorts of animals and what stages of the child- 

 life are conscious, it is necessary to formulate some objective, or 

 indirect, test of consciousness. Even if, as in common with many 

 psychologists the speaker believes, the direct consciousness of 

 other selves is involved in every self's consciousness of itself, such 

 direct consciousness is evidently not present in the mere scientific 

 study of animals, of babies, and of primitive men. That these organ- 

 isms are conscious is not, under these conditions, directly or posi- 

 tively known: their consciousness is affirmed or denied by infer- 



possessor of a body. The "question of genesis" is, from this point of view, as 

 Baldwin says (Development and Evolution, pp. 8 and 10; chap, ix, sec. 3, p. 129) 

 a question of " the development of mind and body taken together. . . . Changes 

 in mind and body go on together and together they constitute the phenomenon. 

 Both organism and mental states . . . may be appealed to in our endeavor to 

 trace the psycho-physical order of events." 



This conception of development as neither exclusively physical nor as exclu- 

 sively mental, but as both at once, has its greatest significance in the fact that 

 it introduces consciousness as an important factor in biological evolution. To 

 be sure, widely different roles are assigned to consciousness by different upholders 

 of this general doctrine. But beneath these divergences is a fundamental agree- 

 ment the admission that consciousness, as such, plays a part in the develop- 

 ment of the composite psycho-physical organism. 



There are two grounds for refusing to regard this science of psycho-physical 

 development as a genetic psychology. The first, advanced by those only who 

 deny the truth of the interaction of mind and body, objects to the theory of 

 psycho-physical development, that it implies not only the influence of physical 

 on psychical, but conversely the influence of psychical on physical. The second 

 objection, urged even by those who grant the possibility of interaction, consists 

 in the assertion that a psycho-physical science would be biology and not psych- 

 ology at all, a composite of physiology and psychology, in which psychology 

 would play the subordinate r61e. 



