292 The American Naturalist. [March, 
PSYCHOLOGY.’ 
The Present State of Psychology.—At a meeting of the 
American Psychological Association, held at Princeton during the 
Christmas holidays just past, Dr. Patton, the eminent President of 
Princeton University, made an address of welcome to the assembled 
psychologists in course of which he reminded them that psychology was 
originally a branch of philosophy as distinguished from science, and 
urged them never to forget this fact and not to reduce psychology to 
the level of a mere science. i 
One, at least, of Dr. Patton’s hearers, found his doctrine hard to ac- 
cept. That psychology has been a part of philosophy all will admit, 
and, in whatever sense we take that much misused word, it is hard to 
believe that the time will ever come when the philosophical signifi- 
cance of the facts which it isthe province of psychology to observe, and 
of the laws which she is bringing to light, will be ignored by the thought- 
ful. There is probably no psychologist so devoted to what Professor 
James wittily calls “the pendulum and chronoscope philosophy,” or so 
sceptical as to the value of current philosophical theories, as to deny 
that psychology is to be an important part of the coming philosophy. 
But this is not, I think, what Dr. Patton had in mind. 
For some generations “science” and “ philosophy” have been re- 
garded as distinct branches of human activity, and there has been 
little friendly commerce between their representatives. “Science” is 
that organized body of knowledge got by observation, experiment and 
demonstration. The spirit of pure curiosity to which we owe it, is a 
comparatively new momentum in man’s intellectual life. Only in the 
last three centuries have its greatest discoveries been made. By 
“ philosophy ” we commonly understand those ancient disciplines in 
which the methods of the newer knowledge have been, as yet, but little 
used. Such are the sciences that deal with the facts of consciousness 
as such—the “sciences” of Logic, Psychology, Ethics and Meta- 
physics. These are commonly termed philosophical. Up to very re- 
cent times, these branches of learning have been but little affected by 
the scientific spirit. Their representatives have been, for the most 
part, men learned in the wisdom of the ancients, but ignorant of that 
of the moderns, and but little versed in the methods which have been 
This department is edited by Dr. Wm. Romaine Newbold, University of Penn- 
sylvania. 
