ES 
— 
—— 
pee a nha er ee te 
—s | 
J.—PSYCHOLOGY. 231 
mechanical dummy which shall stand for man in our science, let us frankly 
acknowledge that man is that thing in all the world with which we have 
the most intimate acquaintance. Let us begin by accepting him for 
what he seems to be, a thinking being that strives to attain the goals he 
desires, to realise his ideals, sometimes succeeding, often failing, but 
always striving so long as he lives. Let us try to understand the history 
of these tendencies to strive, as they are revealed in the individual and the 
species; to understand more nearly our knowing, our imagining, our 
recollecting, our judging and reasoning, as they serve us in our strivings 
for the attainment of our goals. 
As we progress with this task, let us cautiously extend the same 
principles of explanation to the animals of successively lower levels. And, 
when in this way we shall have gained some understanding of the life of 
the animalcule, we shall, perhaps, be able to begin to understand the 
physiology of the complex organism in its broader aspects. Instead of 
trying to illuminate human society by likening it to an animal mechanism, 
as was the fashion of the nineteenth century, we may find that we can 
profitably invert the process, that we can illuminate the complex organism 
by likening it to a well-organised harmonious human society, a society 
which can adjust itself to a thousand disturbances and can recover itself 
from grave disorders, just because and in so far as each member, endowed 
with limited powers of adaptation, steadfastly strives always to achieve 
the goal prescribed by his own nature and by his active relations with all 
his fellow-citizens. 
But here we shall be met again by the cry of the timid psychologist. 
‘You are not scientific,’ he will say, ‘for you are disregarding the 
fundamental postulate of all science, namely, that all events are strictly 
determined, that mechanistic causation rules universally.’ To this we 
ean only reply by exhorting him once more to have courage, assuring him 
that ‘Not all propositions made by all philosophers are true, neither does 
a proposition become true through being frequently repeated.’ 
Let us be content to postpone metaphysics and to start out from two 
indisputable empirical facts: first, the fact that sometimes men create 
new things, such as great works of art and literature and new scientific 
formule. Secondly, the fact that, when the normal man simply and 
strongly desires a certain end and perceives certain bodily movements 
to be means to that end, those movements follow upon that desire and that 
perception. Here are well-established empirical generalisations from 
which we may confidently start out, refusing to be held up by questions 
at present insoluble, such as—How can consciousness deflect the path 
of a single molecule in my brain? Answers to such questions are quite 
unnecessary as foundations for purposive psychology. It is in the highest 
degree probable that, as Science progresses, it will become clear that such 
insoluble questions have been wrongly stated and should never have been 
~ asked. 
Let us not deny ourselves the right to build up a psychology that may 
be of use and value to our fellow-workers in the social sciences, because 
_ we cannot at present answer the most difficult of all questions. The 
physicist is equally nonplussed if you ask him comparable questions, 
such as—How does one molecule attract or repel another? What is the 
nature of chemical affinity? What is electricity? But he does not 
