October 14, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



487 



have similar subjective states, is just as 

 irrelevant and as paralyzing as it would be 

 for the physicist, chemist and astronomer, 

 and any old answer makes just as little real 

 practical difference of any conceivable kind 

 in the one field as in the other. Yet the 

 need of such a cult and all its symptoms, 

 how they came to arise and how very real 

 they sometimes are, and their forms of 

 documentation in both the oriental and the 

 modern world, constitute not only a very 

 important but a fascinating problem for 

 inductive psychology, while the ways of 

 meeting these needs are legitimate and now 

 even pressing questions of the higher indi- 

 vidual pedagogy. 



Finally, as to the field and methods of 

 scientific psychology, the present speaker 

 feels profoundly limitations that prevent 

 him from rising to the height of the great 

 argument for unification so wisely proposed 

 in the plan of this congress, and can only 

 briefly indicate a view perhaps yet more 

 personal than what has preceded, recog- 

 nizing that very different ones are held 

 by many if not most of his wiser colleagues. 

 First, no trace of sentiency, even the faint- 

 est, down to and perhaps even into the 

 plant world, should be alien to our interest. 

 If in doubt between Wasmann and Forel, 

 on one hand, and the mechanical interpre- 

 tations of the tropisms and taxies as held 

 by Loeb, Bethe and UexkuU, we should 

 recall and profit by the fate of Descarte's 

 conception that even the higher animals 

 were only automata. In experimenting on 

 these, under the controlled conditions of 

 the laboratory, we should not neglect the 

 observations of the field naturalists nor 

 ignore even the more valuable of the con- 

 tribiitions of our agricultural stations, eco- 

 nomic zoology, the stock farm and the men- 

 agerie, men hunters, etc. Studies here need 

 sympathy as well as controlled conditions. 

 We also want compends of what is known 

 of each of the important animals and birds 



nearest to man, and to make contact with 

 dynamic or functional biology in its efforts 

 to pass beyond morphology and investigate 

 life, histories, habits and causes of varia- 

 tion, postulating that the manifestations of 

 instinct are just as differentiated and as 

 persistent as those of morphology itself. 

 No philosophic prejudice should make us 

 forget that animals have the same will to 

 live, love of offspring, fear, anger, jealousy, 

 individual attachments, memory, attention, 

 knowledge of locality, home-making in- 

 stincts and senses that we do. Nor should 

 we deny that empirical methods, whether 

 they have yet done so or not, are quite 

 capable of giving sufficient evidence for the 

 existence of psychic powers as radically dif- 

 ferent from our own as those claimed for 

 photodermatism or the topochemical sense 

 of the antennse of ants. Not only, then, 

 might the old maxim, 'Psychologus nemo 

 nisi physiologus' be now also with much 

 propriety reversed, but physiological psy- 

 chology is now expanding both ways to- 

 ward a larger biological philosophy, and 

 studies of life and mind will henceforth be 

 more and more inseparable just in propor- 

 tion as genetic or evolutionary conceptions 

 pervade our field. 



Child-study, which began so crudely and 

 has long since silenced many, though not 

 yet all, of the objections raised against it, 

 has already demonstrated its practical 

 value for education, and is acquiring a 

 place of its own in the literature of other 

 departments, especially pathology, philol- 

 ogy and criminology, and is beginning to 

 prove itself a key of unsuspected value in 

 unlocking problems connected with the pre- 

 historic development of the race, supple- 

 menting studies of the adult mind some- 

 what as embryology does anatomy and hist- 

 ology. It has not only made new connec- 

 tions between our work and the above de- 

 partments, but is steadily developing a 

 logic which, though as yet unwritten, is 



