192 PSYCHOLOGY. 



us ; we do our best to tell what it is, but in spite of our 

 good will we may go astray, and give a description more 

 applicable to some other sort of thing. The only safeguard 

 is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the 

 thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until 

 at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached. 

 Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee 

 the psychologist can give for the soundness of any partic- 

 ular psychologic observation which he may report. Such a 

 system we ourselves must strive, as far as may be, to attain. 

 The English writers on psychology, and the school of 

 Herbart in Germany, have in the main contented them- 

 selves with such results as the immediate introspection of 

 single individuals gave, and shown what a body of doctrine 

 they may make. The works of Locke, Hume, Reid, Hart- 

 ley, Stewart, Brown, the Mills, will always be classics in 

 this line ; and in Professor Bain's Treatises M'e have prob- 

 ably the last word of what this method taken mainly by 

 itself can do — the last monument of the youth of our science, 

 still untechnical and generally intelligible, like the Chem- 

 istry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was 

 used. 



The Experimental Method. But psychology is passing 

 into a less simple phase. Within a few j^ears what one may 

 call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, car- 

 ried on by experimental methods, asking of course every 

 moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncer- 

 tainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical 

 means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and 

 could hardly have arisen in a country w^hose natives 

 could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, 

 Yierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success 

 has brought into the field an array of younger experi- 

 mental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the 

 mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in 

 which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing 

 them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method 

 of attack ha^dng done what it can, the method of patience, 

 starWng out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind 



