«909.] FULLERTOX— DARWIX AND MENTAL SCIEN'CES. xxvii 



who are no longer young can easily think ourselves back ; and, then, 

 touching upon those sciences as they are at the present da}'. I fore- 

 stall criticism by remarking that no one can be more conscious of 

 the very impressionistic nature of the pictures which I thus draw 

 with a few strokes than am I myself. 



Can we not remember a psychology which no one attempted to 

 treat as a natural science? A psychology which accepted a mind 

 endowed with a certain group of faculties or powers, which seemed 

 as ultimate, as irreducible, as little to be explained or accounted for 

 as if the mind had been abstracted, fully developed, from some other 

 universe than ours, and were incorporated in a tenement chosen at 

 haphazard, which had to be accepted as serving its purpose passably 

 well for a season? It was a psychology which lived in an atmos- 

 phere of abstractions, was inextricably mixed up with philosophical 

 speculations, and took comparatively little note of the differences 

 between minds, and the significance of such. It was a psycholog)' 

 to which the revelations of mind in the lower animals, the dawning 

 intelligence of the infant, the aberrations from normal development 

 discoverable in the idiot or the mentally deranged, the mental dif- 

 ferences which characterize the races and peoples which cover our 

 globe, remained relatively insignificant. 



I do not mean to underestimate the science of psychology even 

 at this stage of its development. But I wish to draw attention to 

 the fact that such a psychology is little more than an attempt to 

 describe, in its general outlines, a given type of mind, that of the 

 normal, developed, civilized man. It accepts the characteristic of 

 such a mind ; it does not attempt to explain them ; in treating mental 

 phenomena in abstraction from the great organism of nature, it 

 reduces the knowledge which it has to a body of facts robbed of a 

 great part of their meaning. 



Of aesthetics and ethics one may speak very much as I have 

 spoken of psycholog}'. The one concerned itself with beauty as 

 it is revealed to man at a certain stage of his intellectual and emo- 

 tional development; the other with his moral judgments, which 

 were accepted as final, indisputable, inexplicable. To one of the 

 most learned of British scholars, the ornament of a great university, 

 it did not seem out of place, a few decades ago, to write a treatise 



