October 14, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



485 



that there is no criterion of truth, save its 

 value as a guide to conduct; that the sci- 

 ences of nature and of mind are, can be 

 and mean only a system of rules for right 

 living and thinking; that to ask what the 

 world and soul are per se is an extravasa- 

 tion of the intellect which was kindled only 

 to shed light upon the supreme problem of 

 how to feel and act aright and to which it is 

 subordinate as means to end; that to ask 

 what mind and nature are per se and apart 

 from all use by heart and will is paranoiac 

 or a new scholastic entity cult, because the 

 end of science as well as the only real es- 

 sence of mind is service? Thus the quest 

 of absolute reality must always end in the 

 solipsistic involucre, which is only a new 

 definition of zero, and pure thought purged 

 of will, feeling and sense can not be an 

 object of psychological study, for it does 

 not exist. 



Mathematics, which is a formulation of 

 the properties of time and space in the sen- 

 sory, applies at most only to motion and 

 force in time and space, and its objects are 

 at the bottom, where those of psychology 

 are at the top of the scale of evolution and 

 complexity. From Pythagoras down to 

 Herbart, Fechner, the hedonistic calculus 

 in ethics which the vilest wretch may master 

 without feeling the faintest impulsion to 

 virtue, the Boolean and even common de- 

 ductive logic which never yet discovered 

 anything, and, indeed, I think, every at- 

 tempted application of mathematics to psy- 

 chology, save only for the simple algebraic 

 or other treatment of statistical data, have 

 later proved an illusion if not a mere affec- 

 tation, and we owe to-day no more to any 

 concept susceptible of mathematical for- 

 mulation than modern physiology does to 

 the old iatrie school that so elaborately 

 treated the bones as levers, the muscles as 

 pulleys, circulation as hydrodynamics, di- 

 gestion as trituration, and insisted, as Plato 

 did for philosophy, that geometry was the 



best preparation for the study of medicine. 

 Perhaps no two types of mind have less in 

 common than the mathematical and the 

 psychological or help each other less and 

 may hurt each other more. The former has 

 given us hosts of defunct definitions, cate- 

 gories and dogmas, and has constructed 

 world-bestriding systems by concatenations 

 of the high a priori kind in a way that 

 must raise the query in every candid and 

 impartial mind whether in the field of 

 mind the precept 'truth for truth's sake' 

 is not as dangerous as the dictum 'art for 

 art's sake' has proven in its, and whether, 

 beside the old injunction 'physics, beware 

 of metaphysics,' we should not erect the 

 warning 'psychology, beware of mathe- 

 matics,' and make due purgation of both 

 its methods and its ideals. 



Thus, the first and, perhaps, the chief 

 danger to psychology as a science to-day 

 seems to me to be its tendency, as by an 

 iron law, to gravitate to methods that are 

 too abstract, deductive, speculative and af- 

 fectively exact. Other sciences long since 

 threw off the influence of the old systems, 

 many of which had dominated them, but 

 psychology is still permeated by them. It 

 still feels the charm of the old insolubilities 

 of ultimate reality, of the relation of mind 

 and body, parallelism or interaction, the 

 primacy of feeling or somatic changes, and 

 is dominated more than it knows by inter- 

 ests in the soul's future, by teleology, free- 

 dom versus necessity, all of which, so far 

 as we see, can never be problems of scien- 

 tific psychology because they can not be 

 answered. The modern psychologist, too, 

 can be neither materialist, idealist, positiv- 

 ist, dogmatist, gnostic or agnostic, or, rath- 

 er, is at the same time all of these in some 

 way or degree. Such problems have a 

 large and very important place in the his- 

 tory of philosophic thought. Their culture 

 value as disciplines is very great, but they 

 belong to a stage of mentation now passing 



