250 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IX. No. 216. 



of the material of history brings us to a 

 teleological sj'stem in whicli every will act 

 is linked with every other will act and the 

 general fact is not a causal law but a will 

 relation. 



The subject of the ' discussion ' which fol- 

 lowed the address of the President was 'The 

 Relations of Will to Belief.' Professors 

 James and Miller, who were to have taken 

 part, were unavoidably detained from the 

 meeting, and the discussion was carried on 

 by Professors Ladd, Hibben, Caldwell and 

 Armstrong. The first three speakers pre- 

 sented their views on the question, especial 

 reference being paid to Professor James' 

 essay, 'The Will to Believe,' while Profes- 

 sor Armstrong closed the debate with a his- 

 torical summary of the subject. 



Of the regular meetings of the Associa- 

 tion for the reading of papers the first 

 was on Wednesday morning and was 

 opened by Mr. E. A. Kirkpatrick on ' The 

 Development of Voluntary Movement.' 

 After describing the case of a young child 

 upon which he based his views, the speaker 

 argued that movements, such as walking, 

 that seem to be learned are in reality 

 largely inherited, and that other nervous 

 and muscular connections are less a matter 

 of experience than is usually thought. 



Professor E. B. Delabarre reported certain 

 experiments made upon himself with Can- 

 nabis Indica, and attributed the effects to 

 the hj'perexcitability of the nervous system 

 induced by the drug. There was a gradual 

 increase in sensory, intellectual, emotional 

 and motor activity, lasting about half the 

 total duration of the main influence, and 

 followed by a gradual decrease to normal 

 or below. 



Professor George T. Ladd read a paper 

 in which he held that psj'chology was not 

 making the progress in this country which 

 might reasonably be expected, and held that 

 the hindrances are, in part at least, matters 

 of personnel in the body of professional 



psychologists. The particular hindrances 

 mentioned by Professor Ladd were, in brief, 

 the excessive scholastic spirit among psy- 

 chologists and the consequent ignorance of 

 the mental life of the great body of the 

 people, the great number of publications by 

 authors of insufficient training, the injury 

 done to the science in the eyes of the laity 

 by methods of discussion and controversy, 

 the invasion of the commercial spirit and 

 the maintenance of an improper attitude 

 toward the other most closely allied sciences. 



In a paper on ' Reason a Mode of In- 

 stinct,' Mr. Henry Rutgei's Marshall argued 

 that the objective mark of an instinct is 

 that it determines in an organism typical 

 reactions of biological significance to the 

 organism ; that opposition to instinct ex- 

 hibits itself in variation from typical reac- 

 tion, and is indicated by hesitancy and then 

 choice. Reason is the psychic coincident 

 of the physical process antecedent to choice. 

 Variation and reasoning both appear as re- 

 actions of a part of a complex physical and 

 psychical system. Variation is statable in 

 terms of instinct, and hence reason itself 

 must be looked upon as a mode of instinct, 

 the observed opposition between the two 

 being due to the complexity of the organic 

 connections of the phenomena. 



Professor Wesley Mills spoke on ' Animal 

 Intelligence and Methods of Investigation,' 

 emphasizing the importance of normal con- 

 ditions in experimenting with lower ani- 

 mals, and objecting to the recent work of 

 Dr. E. L. Thorndike, on the ground that he 

 had violated this fundamental principle. 

 The speaker further argued in general for 

 greater caution in drawing conclusions from 

 observations on animals. 



Professor Mary Whiton Calkins read a 

 technical paper on ' Psj^chological Classifi- 

 cation,' dealing particularly with the attri- 

 butes of sensation. 



On Thursday morning, December 29th, 

 the members of the American Physiological 



