322 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV. No. 



hibitions, fatigiie,— these are the terms into 

 which our inner life is analyzed by psy- 

 chologists who are not doctors, and in 

 which, by hook or crook, its aberrations 

 from normality have to be expressed. 

 They can indeed be described, after the 

 fact, in such terms, but always lamely; 

 and everyone must feel how much is unac- 

 counted for, how much left out. 



When we turn to Janet's pages, we find 

 entirely other forms of thought employed. 

 Oscillations of the level of mental energy, 

 differences of tension, splittings of con- 

 sciousness, sentiments of insufficiency and 

 of unreality, substitutions, agitations and 

 anxieties, depersonalizations— such are the 

 elementary conceptions which the total 

 view of his patient's life imposes on this 

 clinical observer. They have little or noth- 

 ing to do with the usual laboratory cate- 

 gories. Ask a scientific psychologist to 

 predict what symptoms a patient must have 

 when his ' supply of mental energy ' 

 diminishes, and he can utter only the word 

 ' fatigue. ' He could never predict such con- 

 sequences as Janet subsumes under his one 

 term 'psyehasthenia' — the most bizarre 

 obsessions and agitations, the most com- 

 plete distortions of the relation between the 

 self and the world. 



I do not vouch for Janet's conceptions 

 being valid, and I do not say that the two 

 ways of looking at the mind contradict 

 each other or are mutually incongruous; I 

 simply say that they are ineongr-aent. Each 

 covers so little of our total mental life 

 that they do not even interfere or jostle. 

 Meanwhile the clinical conceptions, though 

 they may be vag-uer than the analytic ones, 

 are certainly more adequate, give the con- 

 creter picture of the Avay the whole mind 

 works, and are of far more urgent prac- 

 tical importance. So the 'pliysieian's atti- 

 tude,' the 'functional psychology,' is as- 

 suredly the thing most worthy of general 

 study to-day. 



I wish to spend this hour on one con- 

 ception of functional psychology, a concep- 

 tion never once mentioned or heard of in 

 laboratory circles, but used perhaps more 

 than any other by common, practical men 

 — I mean the conception of the amount of 

 energy available for running one's mental 

 and moral operations by. Practically 

 every one knows in his own person the 

 difference between the days when the tide 

 of this energy is high in him and those 

 when it is low, though no one knows 

 exactly what reality the term energy 

 covers when used here, or what its tides, 

 tensions, and levels are in themselves. 

 This vagueness is probably the reason why 

 our scientific psychologists ignore the con- 

 ception altogether. It undoubtedly con- 

 nects itself with the energies of the nervous 

 system, but it presents fluctuations that 

 can not easily be translated into neural 

 terms. It offers itself as the notion of a 

 quantity, but its ebbs and floods produce 

 extraordinary qualitative results. To have 

 its level raised is the most important thing 

 that can happen to a man, yet in all my 

 reading I know of no single page or para- 

 graph of a scientific psychology book in 

 which it receives mention— the psycholo- 

 gists have left it to be treated by the moral- 

 ists and mind-curers and doctors exclu- 

 sively. 



Every one is familiar with the phenome- 

 non of feeling more or less alive on dif- 

 ferent days. Every one knows on any 

 given day that there are energies slumber- 

 ing in him which the incitements of that 

 day do not call forth, but which he might 

 display if these were greater. Most of us 

 feel as if we lived habitually with a sort 

 of cloud weighing on us, below our highest 

 notch of clearness in discernment, sureness 

 in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. 

 Compared with what we ought to be, we 

 are only half awake. Our fires are 

 damped, our drafts are checked. We 



