194 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



should we hasten to fashion from them a key to all the most diflB.cult 

 problems of our science ? It is what the psychologist seems every- 

 where prone to do. A departmental investigation is made to carry the 

 weight of a comprehensive system. This, it seems to me, is the 

 philosophical bias at work. 



In contemporary English psychology there is only one complete and 

 world-explaining system of this sort, and that is the system which has 

 been developed by the keen and penetrating work of Professor C. Spearman. 

 Here again we are invited to begin with experiment, not merely upon 

 perceptual processes, not merely upon imagery, not merely upon more 

 complex intellectual responses still, but upon any psychological problem 

 whatever. Wherever we begin we shall speedily find illustrated the 

 working of the few immutable laws upon which all mental structure, and 

 it may be the very Universe itself, are built. They stand indeed at the 

 portals of our science. Know them and everything is plain ; ignore them 

 and all is confused. They are conceived, not as tendencies serving the 

 ends of biological adaptation, but after the fashion of physical principles 

 of universal scope describing the inevitable structure and frame of 

 mental life. 



That Professor Spearman has done more for the development of 

 several fields of psychological research than any other living Englishman 

 cannot be disputed. His contributions to the development of psychological 

 statistics, and his work in the field of the investigation of intelligence must 

 give him a permanent place in the history of the subject. Yet the notion 

 of experiment mainly as a tool for laying bare and illustrating the 

 operation of a few basic and fixed laws must seem to the biologically 

 minded investigator very unsatisfying. Having found a scheme which 

 seems to set the results of certain experimental investigations in order, 

 why should we, with all the wealth and variability of human response as 

 our subject, try to fit the same scheme in everywhere ? Surely to do 

 this either our scheme must be so broad that its explanatory value in 

 relation to particular concrete problems is bound to be very remote, or 

 else it must be ruthless in its dealings with fact. In writing some years 

 ago of his ' theory of two factors,' Professor Spearman said : ' It would 

 seem as if psychologists have now got definitely to accept the Theory of 

 Two Factors ; it becomes a Bed of Procrustus into which all our doctrines 

 • must somehow be made to fit, even though the so doing may at times 

 involve a not unpainful surgical operation upon them.' I admire the 

 courage that prompts such a statement, but I find it difficult to square 

 this attitude with that scrupulous regard for the immediate facts which 

 must mark the experimental biologist. 



No survey, however scrappy, of contemporary movements in 

 experimental psychology can be satisfactory without some reference to 

 Behaviourism. Of all the movements this is the one which is most _ 

 thoroughly experimental, alike in its methods and in its formation of m 

 problems. It has laid firm hold on the point of view that experimental M 

 psychology is an investigation of the conditions determining high level "i 

 biological reactions in animal and man. It is so round in its denunciation 

 of philosophy that its excessive readiness to systematise its own principles 

 of explanation is amusing. We can see this readiness in the haste with which 



