rEBKUART 23, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



299 



These are meta-psychological considerations 

 which we can neither prove nor disprove; 

 they are matters of taste in philosophy, of 

 individual bias, popular oracles to which 

 those of literary proclivities or those who 

 love the ancient developmental history of 

 psychology can appeal. They are matters 

 of creed, and often with some, and it may 

 be great, practical value. The same is true 

 of the old issue between dualism and mon- 

 ism, of freedom versus determinism, the 

 nature of time, and still more so of space. 

 These old problems in all their restate- 

 ments, including that of the priority of 

 psychic or somatic changes in feeling, the 

 question of the educability of the pure 

 absolute quality of retentiveness, have high 

 pedagogic value and have impelled many 

 ingenuous minds to the study of psychol- 

 ogy, and their motivation is hard to exor- 

 cise in the present state of psychology, even 

 from the stage of scientific maturity. As 

 old sailing ships were trimmed by rolling 

 heavy ballast chests full of old chains to 

 starboard or larboard, according as the 

 ship listed this way or that, so the ship 

 of life sometimes needs to be ethically 

 trimmed by changing the stress of these old 

 and broken fetters of the soul ; but not till 

 the far-off day when pragmatism has quite 

 absorbed and digested the concept of pure 

 science should these be confused with the 

 precious cargo of facts. 



So of all attempts to define knowledge 

 and its relations to reality, to deliminate 

 subject and object and to decant the uni- 

 verse from one into the other, or to de- 

 termine how many parts of each are found 

 in the mixture of experience, whether the 

 ego is constituted of flitting, disconnected 

 present states or is the stream bed in which 

 they flow, or whether, on the other hand, 

 every change of attention is an expression 

 of the basal and eternal will to live. If 

 homo studiosus were less isolated from the 

 daily struggle for existence, suffered less 



from psychic anemia, if, instead of being- 

 pampered with a second-hand, attenuated 

 book knowledge, he had had in his own 

 person more of the experience he attempts 

 to analyze, and if his selfish interest in a 

 future life were entirely eliminated, all 

 those questions would fade into dreams and 

 shadows. Neither the abnormal nor the 

 selfish impulses which animate these impul- 

 sions are scientific, and therefore these 

 questions should be segregated from psy- 

 chology, for which they have no more 

 pertinence than they have for chemistry 

 or astrophysics. 



Again, psychology inherits from philos- 

 ophy a passion to classify the soul into 

 activities, parts, faculties; to attempt to 

 organize the different sciences; to legislate 

 what should be done in each field and under 

 each name; to demarcate boundaries be- 

 tween esthetics, ethics, logics, psychology 

 and the rest. The age when this work can 

 do much good or harm ended with Hegel 

 and Comte, unless it have some value for 

 the pedagogy of curricula or be of use to 

 the maker of the scheme in putting his own 

 mind in order. Logic never led to the dis- 

 covery of anything, not even of a new 

 method of investigation. At best it fol- 

 lows the discoverer, often at a distance, 

 and may at best afterwards tell how his 

 work was done. Psychology seeks its own 

 in any and every field where psychic action 

 is intense and manifold. But all schemat- 

 izations of the relation of different fields 

 are only tenuous formulations of the per- 

 sonal equation, and if they could be valid 

 for a day are sure to be shattered by the 

 next fruitful research. More than this, too 

 long acquaintance with the breezy altitudes 

 of philosophy at the same time predisposes 

 and disqualifies' for this task because it 

 tends to a nimbleness impossible for a mind 

 which carries a heavy cargo of facts. In- 

 tellectual temperance is not its forte. In 

 the day of Borelli, and again with Fechner 



