488 



SCIENCE. 



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



destined in my own fond belief to become 

 an instrument of great value in reinter- 

 preting the bionomic law of recapitulation, 

 shedding new light upon early develop- 

 mental stages, and thus giving psychology 

 a genetic perspective which it has so sadly 

 lacked in the past. Students in this field 

 are impregnating insignificant and tran- 

 sient acts, expressions and feeling with new 

 meanings. This work still suffers from 

 the fact thatj like the Renaissance, the 

 Reformation and to some extent Darwin- 

 ism itself, it had to begin outside academic 

 circles, which are now so rapidly opening 

 to it, and develop popular interest and 

 momentum before it could attain scientific 

 methods. It has thus survived and profit- 

 ed by a volume of honest criticism which 

 would have swamped a less vital movement, 

 and that too by many of the very ablest of 

 our craft who did not at first fully under- 

 stand its scope and value. Now, although 

 we might point with justifiable pride to its 

 books, journals, chairs, its body of results 

 that all accept, we believe that far greater 

 results lie in the near future, and some- 

 times some of us indulge in dreams of a 

 new dispensation of psychology doctrine 

 with evolution more evolved as its center. 

 Again, a new alliance is now cemented 

 with the psychological side of anthropology 

 and even ethnology. With almost no aca- 

 demic representation or support, it is our 

 government that has developed a body of 

 scholars that in the study of the Indian 

 have, in the language of another, 'set the 

 world its best example of gathering and 

 recording the myths, customs, rites, occupa- 

 tions and modes of life, thought and feel- 

 ing of the decadent, yet the most repre- 

 sentative of all the races of the stone age.' 

 Psychologists are learning to profit by this 

 work and also to extend their interest to 

 every such record of the sentiments, habits, 

 social organizations and superstitions of 

 primal man. As a naturalist delights in 



new species, so we more and more both 

 need and desire to profit by every new 

 account that sheds light on how the re- 

 motest aborigine thinks, feels and acts, and 

 we do it with a psychic tension and exhila- 

 ration as if some great correlation with 

 other allied fields impended. We feel a 

 closer bond with sociology because it, too, 

 is coming rapidly into rapport with an- 

 thropology and finding the key to so many 

 of its problems in tribal and other con- 

 sanguineous forms of early society. The 

 reciprocal suggestiveness of this depart- 

 ment with psychogenesis is already begin- 

 ning to bear fruit. 



So in mental and moral alienation we 

 have a few precious and detached studies 

 of psychic symptoms in individuals that 

 are almost classic. The older epoch-making 

 interpretations of epilepsy by Hughlings- 

 Jaekson, new views of hysteria, paranoia, 

 a choice fresh little literature on dementia 

 prcEcox, a large collection of records of 

 delusions, hallucinations, automatisms and 

 other phenomena of the borderland be- 

 tween sanity and insanity, gathered at the 

 behoof of an obsolescent hypothesis, but 

 interpreted in a way that has happily called 

 attention to subliminal processes and also 

 the methods of their exploitation by hyp- 

 notism. Many of these phenomena are de- 

 volutionary y others are normal states mag- 

 nified by disease as if it were a microscope. 

 Criminology, meanwhile, has shown us feral 

 man in our midst and given a copious an- 

 thology of facts about degeneration and 

 perversion, many of which could now be 

 used to make the teaching of practical 

 ethics more interesting and effective. It is 

 high time that mental perversions should 

 be represented by chairs in our medical 

 schools, especially if they are to make head- 

 way against quacks and mind-curists, save 

 the profession from some of the tragic ex- 

 periences just recorded so vividly in the 

 confessions of Veresaeft, teach the medical 



