4S« 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 511. 



away and doomed perliaps ultimately to 

 become as ueberwunclene Standpuncte, as 

 those of vortexes, the plenum or vacuum, 

 the Plutonic versus the Neptunic theories, 

 have become for science. The ethical bear- 

 ings of many of these questions once 

 thought so great are rapidly becoming 

 insignificant, but they still bulk large 

 wherever psychologists are dominated by 

 theological interests, or even accept, as far 

 more do, their problems at the hands of 

 metaphysics. Our science is still, like Mil- 

 ton's tawny lion, pawing to get free from 

 the soil in which it is just being born. 

 Many text-books and treatises modulate 

 from the latest science to the oldest specu- 

 lative surds and speak in two alternating 

 registers, while others evaluate new results 

 by their bearings upon antique problems 

 wrongly put in a pre-scientific age, but 

 made venerable and most significant for 

 history by the accretions of the best and 

 most ingenious thought of ages. Thus, the 

 second danger that besets our work is that 

 it is not sufficiently emancipated from the 

 now conventionalized criteria of past sys- 

 tems of thought, and has not subordinated 

 these as it should to be used not as finalities 

 or solutions, but only as empirical data for 

 larger generalizations that transcend them. 

 But if it is the philosophy of philosophy, it 

 .comes to many of these problems not to 

 destroy, but fulfil. 



The third source of danger to psychology 

 arises from the theory of knowledge or 

 epistemology. The human sovil inherits 

 the result of a vast experience acquired by 

 the race but innate in the individual, but 

 the latter can not validate much of it in 

 his own restricted life. He is so sur- 

 charged with paleoatavistie traces, tenden- 

 cies, instincts, from back, perhaps, to the 

 amphioxus or even the amoeba, that he 

 often seems to himself to live and move 

 in a world that is both within and without 

 unrealized, alien and afar. What we in- 



herit is so much better organized than what 

 we acquire, it is so dominant and, perhaps, 

 so unmodifiable and unaccountable, that the 

 world and self seem shadowy, and our un- 

 reflecting confidence in these is thus easily 

 shocked out of its poise by Berkeley and 

 Hume till some come to feel that a life so 

 unexplained is hardly worth living. When, 

 in addition to these predisposing causes 

 which for some diatheses may become a 

 neurosis, the thinker leads a pallid, anamic 

 life in academic isolation from the great, 

 throbbing, struggling world, and in the 

 study devotes himself to passionless con- 

 templation pampered by the second-hand 

 knowledge of life derived from books, it is 

 not strange in a precocious and over-civil- 

 ized age with more knowledge forced upon 

 the mind than it can digest, that the veil of 

 Maya sometimes settles fold on fold over 

 the soul till it almost feels the panic of the 

 claustraphobiac and must break out and 

 away to find reality or smother. It feels 

 that, like the Holy Grail, removed from 

 the sight of carnal men, it can be sought 

 only by those purged from all defilement 

 of the world of sense, but it must be found 

 and quaffed or the soul be lost to truth. 

 For those paranoiac minds sitting thus in 

 prison, whose constitutional malady is ag- 

 gravated by the doctrine of the ideality of 

 space, the greatest philosophic delusion of 

 modern times, it is well to have highways 

 of escape opened up out of agnosticism. 

 For many, if not most, too, a touch of it 

 biit not too much of it is, perhaps, a neces- 

 sary part of the complex initiation of youth 

 into its world, but the severer types of this 

 discipline seem more suited to senescent 

 than to adolescent men and races. For the 

 psychologist, however, in pursuit of his 

 legitimate vocation, to be liable to be held 

 up at anj^ time to prove that the soul has 

 a brain or a body, that the self or the ob- 

 jects of sense exist, that other people and 

 animals with similar organs to his own 



