March 23, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



275 



work of the correlation of the old empirical 

 knowledge with which alone engineering 

 formerly worked. With the completion of 

 this latter task science might come to be 

 the sole guide of engineering, but for two 

 considerations. 



First, as engineering adopts the knowl- 

 edge which science has correlated it simul- 

 taneously unearths new uncorrelated knowl- 

 edge. Science indeed correlates this in turn, 

 but not instantaneously, so that engineer- 

 ing has always at its hand both that which 

 science has correlated and its own empirical 

 discoveries which science has not yet had 

 time to arrange. As optimists we may well 

 expect that this uncorrelated knowledge 

 will form a gradually decreasing fraction 

 of the whole, but can we expect it ever to 

 vanish completely? Must not science's 

 approach to exclusive leadership be asymp- 

 totic ? 



We begin to get a glimmering of the 

 vastness of the scheme of creation when we 

 remember that every lengthening of man's 

 artificial vision by means of telescope and 

 camera, every new strengthening of tele- 

 scope, sensitizing of plate, and lengthening 

 of exposure brings a proportional increase 

 in the number of visible suns, telling us 

 that even at that inconceivable distance we 

 have not begun to approach the limit of 

 the discoverable universe. When we turn 

 from telescope to microscope and thence to 

 the inferred constitution of matter, we find 

 with every new refinement of observation 

 and inference a proportional addition of 

 new wonders, a proportional increment in 

 the complexity of natural phenomena. 

 Hence while we may speculate that, as there 

 must be a place where the stars end, so 

 there must be a degree beyond which the 

 subdivision of matter can not go, and a 

 limit to the number of nature's laws, we 

 may well ask whether either that limit or 

 the limit of stellar space will be reached in 



that little throb in the pulse of the universe 

 which we call the habitable period of this 

 earth. Will man survive long enough to 

 complete the discovery of all laws, so that 

 no uncorrelated phenomena will remain for 

 the engineer to unearth ? 



The second of the two considerations 

 which tend to postpone the completion of 

 science's leadership is that the beautiful as 

 distinguished from the useful and the 

 good will increase without limit its de- 

 mands upon the work of the engineer. 

 Though the beautiful itself should in time 

 be capable of complete mathematical anal- 

 ysis, who shall say that that time, now seem- 

 ingly so inconceivably remote, can arrive 

 during man's earthly stay? 



Henry M. Howe 



OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION 

 AND RESEARCH 1 



The American Psychological Association, 

 like the infants who are among the objects 

 of our study, celebrated its first birthday 

 some months after it was born. We are 

 thus able to hold at the same time our 

 twenty-fifth meeting and mark the comple- 

 tion of nearly twenty-five years of activity. 

 This period covers the working life of most 

 of us and about half the adult life of the 

 science in which we work. Wundt's 

 ' ' Physiologische Psychologic, ' ' published in 

 1874, may be taken to mark the coming of 

 age of the experimental work of Weber, 

 Helmholtz and Fechner. But if psychology 

 as a science was made in Germany, the raw 

 materials were contributed from many na- 

 tions, many centuries, many sciences; and 

 the leading strings attaching us to Germany 

 were severed at about the time when this 

 association was organized. 



1 Address given on the occasion of the celebra- 

 tion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Ameri- 

 can Psychological Association, New York, Decem- 

 ber 28, 1916.- 



