MENTAL INHERITANCE 467 



having reduced a conscious experience to simpler terms, the process of 

 reconstruction begins. The functions and processes that have been re- 

 duced to numerical terms are recombined in their several amounts 

 and the integration when complete represents an individual in so far 

 as that individual is typical. With the absolute and exhaustive de- 

 scription of the individual as such, science is not concerned. Typical 

 minds thus derived are, so to say, minds of different length and breadth 

 and thickness. They are analogous to the variable organs and func- 

 tions of the body. Their scientific description differs from the crude 

 characterizations which we pass upon our friends and enemies as the 

 law of falling bodies differs from an observer's account of a balloonist's 

 accident. 



The steps, then, in the procedure of individual psychology are 



(1) the measurement of a group of mental processes or functions, 



(2) analysis for the discovery of elementary or fundamental dif- 

 ferences, (3) integration of these differential factors, and (4) a classi- 

 fication of types; measurement, analysis, integration, description, a 

 common and justified sequence in the general methodology of science. 

 Compare with this procedure the instances taken a few moments ago 

 from the psychology of common sense — the method employed, let us 

 say, by Pearson. The first and the last steps are combined (" con- 

 scientiousness " or " assertiveness " represents the type), analysis and 

 integration are omitted, and an offhand estimate is substituted for care- 

 ful measurement. 



I fear that I have been tedious and that I have perplexed you over- 

 much with matters remote from your primary interests. My excuse is 

 that I have given you in part a program for the future, and that methods 

 in the making are notoriously self-conscious and awkward of expression. 

 If it were ten years later doubtless I could display more product and 

 vex you less with the process. I could, I have reason to believe, show 

 you this psychological problem of ours, which already at the early stage 

 of crude quantification has proved itself extremely fertile, in a much 

 more mature and fruitful state. 



Now that you have before you, in outline, the problem of mental 

 inheritance, its debt to biology, and the present necessity — if the prob- 

 lem is to advance — for the analytical treatment of traits by a science of 

 individual differences, let me in closing return to my earlier remarks 

 touching the import of inheritance in human history. I urged that 

 human knowledge and human obligation have grown out of proportion 

 to human talent. So far as we can tell, the child of to-day possesses 

 the same nervous system, the same sense organs, evinces the same 

 instinctive tendencies, in short, develops with the same physical and 

 mental equipment as the child of unnumbered generations ago. If, so 

 far as education went, the primitive boy was ready for man's estate at 



