October 14, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



483 



and at best only one culminating stage, like 

 a submarine plant's leaves and blossoms 

 that alone reach the surface 1 Does not ex- 

 perience by its very nature tend to lapse 

 below the threshold of consciousness, and 

 just in proportion as it becomes complete 

 does it not sink beyond the reach of sub- 

 jective analysis! Nay, more; does it not 

 so strongly tend to become automatic that 

 to become perfect it must lose even the 

 power to be transmitted by instruction, but 

 only by heredity? If so, must we not 

 supplement the methods of internal by 

 those of external observation, subjective by 

 objective, and deductive by empirical re- 

 searches? Just as history is now studied 

 more as the daily life of the average man 

 and as the play of but half-understood 

 economic racial and telluric forces, and less 

 as the mere records of battles and the acts 

 of kings and courts, so must not psychology 

 more and more center in the study of love, 

 pity, fear, anger, pride, conscience, beauty, 

 love of power and wealth, sympathy and 

 all those social instincts that make our life 

 their sport? Should we not find helpful 

 biological suggestion in the example of 

 Bateson and his growing circle of followers, 

 who would go back to facts baldly recorded 

 to lay broader foundations for their pyra- 

 mid, instead of steepening its angles to a 

 tower or inverting it, and be content in 

 some fields with a merely descriptive psy- 

 chology that masses facts, not ignoring 

 those that now seem most trivial, register- 

 ing reflexes that, perhaps, appear but once 

 in a lifetime, vascular and other somatic 

 resonances that seem meaningless, in the 

 hope that ultimately we may be able to 

 infer something about the psychic states 

 that once animated them and do something 

 to restore the great volume and variety of 

 lost soul and life that mechanism, missing 

 links and extinct species, animal and hu- 

 man, have taken oiit of the world? 



For myself, if I were challenged by some 



advocate of a psychology without a soul to . 

 improvise a working hypothesis of what 

 soul may be like, I might boldly begin by 

 assuming it to have been more potent in 

 the past than it is in the present, but ever 

 tending to vanish as heat, which once made 

 the earth incandescent, does to dissipate 

 itself; as something with which the death- 

 less germ plasm is more instinct than are 

 the somatic organs it evolves, even the brain 

 where it has now taken refuge; as some- 

 thing no less closely related than theology 

 once made the persons of the Trinity to be 

 among themselves with the nisus fonni- 

 tiviis, whatever that is, which when the 

 world was young and lusty evolved all the 

 products of natural selection, developed 

 and then diiferentiated hunger and love, 

 "adapted flowers and insects to each other, 

 made instinct and inspired all its pur- 

 posive acts vdthout the aid of any sense of 

 purpose, was shaped by all the forces that 

 have modified life since it began; that 

 domesticated useful and tried to extermin- 

 ate noxious animals and plants, invented 

 thousands of languages the syntax of some 

 of the lowest of which are the new marvels 

 of philologists ; that laid down the lines of 

 the primeval religions and struck out all 

 the unwritten laws and customs of social 

 animals and tribal men, the latter more 

 complex and perfect in many respects, as a 

 recent English blue book on Africa insists, 

 than any that civilized legislators have yet 

 devised. On this view soul life when it 

 was chiefly passion, feeling, impulse, may 

 have been far more dominant over the body 

 and all its processes than now. It was hot, 

 intense, lived out close to the elements, 

 always in sight of the edge of the fierce 

 struggle for survival. It was more life 

 than thought, more collective and racial 

 than individual, shaped the world from 

 within rather than, as science is now learn- 

 ing to do, perhaps, in a derived and sec- 

 ondary way, from without. Everything 



