March 1, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



331 



of the wisdom or unwisdom of her dis- 

 obedience to the doctors, and I cite her 

 here solely as an example of what ideas 

 can do. Her ideas have kept her a prac- 

 tically well woman for months after she 

 should have given up and gone to bed. 

 They have annulled all pain and weakness 

 and given her a cheerful active life, un- 

 usually beneficent to others to whom she 

 has afforded help. 



How far the mind-cure movement is des- 

 tined to extend its influence, or what in- 

 tellectual modifications it may yet undergo, 

 no one can foretell. Being a religious 

 movement, it will certainly outstrip the 

 purviews of its rationalist critics, such as 

 we here may be supposed to be. 



I have thus brought a pretty wide in- 

 duction to bear upon my thesis, and it ap- 

 pears to hold good. The human individual 

 lives usually far within his limits; he 

 possesses powers of various sorts which he 

 habitually fails to use. He energizes 

 below his maximum, and he behaves below 

 his optimum. In elementary faculty, in 

 coordination, in power of inhibition and 

 control, in every conceivable way, his life 

 is contracted like the field of vision of an 

 hysteric subject — but with less excuse, for 

 the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the 

 rest of us it is only an inveterate hahit — 

 the habit of inferiority to our full self— 

 that is bad. 



Expressed in this vague manner, every- 

 one must admit my thesis to be true. The 

 terms have to remain vague; for though 

 every man of woman born knows what is 

 meant by such phrases as having a good 

 vital tone, a high tide of spirits, an elastic 

 temper, as living energetically, working 

 easily, deciding firmly, and the like, we 

 should all be put to our trumps if asked 

 to explain in terms of scientific psychology 

 just what such expressions mean. We can 

 draw some child-like psychophysical dia- 

 grams, and that is all. In physics the con- 



ception of 'energy' is perfectly defined. It 

 is correlated with the conception of ' work. ' 

 But mental work and moral work, although 

 we can not live without talking about them, 

 are terms as yet hardly analyzed, and 

 doubtless mean several heterogeneotis ele- 

 mentary things. Our muscular work is a 

 voluminous physical quantity, but our 

 ideas and volitions are minute forces of 

 release, and by 'work' here we mean the 

 substitution of higher kinds for lower kinds 

 of detent. Higher and lower here are 

 qualitative terms, not translatable im- 

 mediately into quantities, unless indeed 

 they should prove to mean newer or older 

 forms of cerebral organization, and unless 

 newer should then prove to mean cortically 

 more superficial, older, cortically more 

 deep. Some anatomists, as you know, 

 have pretended this ; but it is obvious that 

 the intuitive or popular idea of mental 

 work, fundamental and absolutely indis- 

 pensable as it is in our lives, possesses no 

 degree whatever of scientific clearness 

 to-day. 



Here, then, is the first problem that 

 emerges from our study. Can any one of 

 us refine upon the conceptions of mental 

 work and mental energy, so as later to be 

 able to throw some definitely analytic light 

 on what we mean by ' having a more elastic 

 moral tone,' or by 'using higher levels of 

 power and will'? I imagine that we may 

 have to wait long before progress in this 

 direction is made. The problem is too 

 homely; one doesn't see just how to get in 

 the electric keys and revolving drums that 

 alone make psychology scientific to-day. 



My fellow-pragmatist in Florence, G. 

 Papini, has adopted a new conception of 

 philosophy. He calls it the doctrine of 

 action in the widest sense, the study of all 

 human powers and means (among which 

 latter, truths of every kind whatsoever 

 figure, of course, in the first rank). From 

 this point of view philosophy is a prag- 



