738 ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY 



normal psychology, and to regard mental diseases as experiments 

 which have been cunningly devised by nature to show us such 

 suppressions and modifications of function as the experimental 

 method demands. Our psj r chological laboratories, situated as 

 they often are in hospitals for nervous and mental diseases, as at 

 the Salp6triere, at Ste. Anne, and at Villejuif, have endeavored 

 to unite the psychologist and the alienist in a common investiga- 

 tion. 



This union, alike in France and in other countries where it has 

 also been accomplished, seems to me to have been advantageous 

 to both sciences. In psychiatry it has to some extent turned the 

 investigator aside from investigations which are actually useless 

 because they cannot be utilized. One is scarcely able, even to-day, 

 to make a complete classification of mental disorders from a single 

 point of view as is required by logic. As Ziehen has remarked, 

 mental diseases are classified differently from the standpoint of 

 symptoms, of etiology, of evolution, and of pathological anatomy. 

 Moreover, it must be confessed that we do not know the real causes 

 of mental diseases; and it is bootless to disguise our ignorance by 

 a cloak of philosophical speculation or of hypothetical anatomy. 

 The pathological psychologist has recognized that he must begin 

 at the beginning. He has endeavored to penetrate more thoroughly 

 and more sympathetically into the mental states of the diseased; 

 he has attained greater accuracy in the analysis of symptoms; he 

 has observed and, so far as possible, has measured the alterations 

 of psychical function. In short, psychological experimentation has 

 introduced into psychiatry a rehabilitation and a refinement of the 

 clinical method. 



The older psychology, permeated as it was throughout with 

 philosophical speculation, claimed to find that the mental states 

 were as simple and as unchanging as its theories. It studied memory 

 in general, reason in general, the theoretical and abstract will, 

 without first taking up the question as to what constitutes- memory, 

 reason, and will in a particular individual, under particular con- 

 ditions, at a particular age, in a particular state of health. The 

 investigation of pathological conditions has forced it to recognize 

 that these phenomena are not fixed and immutable; it has come 

 to see that they wax and wane, that they are subject to change, 

 and that a multitude of degrees are represented in their develop- 

 mental transformations. Psychology has thus been led to seek, 

 even in the normal individual, for those changes and oscillations 

 which it has found to be characteristic of the abnormal individual; 

 it is no longer abstract, but has become a more real and living 

 thing. If one may use the expression, it has ceased to be purely 

 static, and has become dynamic. The study of the oscillations of 



