THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



sciences of comparative anatomy and 

 comparative physiology. It has firmly 

 established itself in a more or less clearly 

 defined field with its own systematic 

 problems and its own experimental 

 methodology. 



An account will now be given of the 

 more important developments from the 

 time of Darwin onward grouped according 

 to the following outline : 



I. The Anecdotal Period CiSjp-c. i8go~) 

 i. The influence of Darwin 

 z. The anecdotal movement 

 3. Contemporary scientific contributions 



II. The Experimental Periodic. 1890- ) 

 1. Beginnings of the movement 

 i. Experimental developments 

 3. Theoretical tendencies 



THE ANECDOTAL PERIOD 



The influence of Darwin 



Although modern comparative psychol- 

 ogy took its rise from the evolutionary 

 movement initiated by Darwin, it gave 

 little promise of developing into a syste- 

 matic science until about the beginning of 

 the last decade of the nineteenth century. 

 In the meantime, it suffered along with 

 biology in general from the strong oppo- 

 sition which the traditional science and 

 theology offered to the evolutionary 

 hypothesis . The early interest lay almost 

 wholly in a defense of the notion of mental 

 continuity. So long as attention was 

 being directed chiefly to the more contro- 

 versial aspects of Darwin's view a normal 

 development along well-balanced and 

 experimental lines could hardly be 

 expected. The anecdotal school arose as 

 the first and most direct result of the 

 influence of Darwin . These early workers 

 felt called upon to hold a brief for human- 

 like mental traits in the higher animals. 

 In the absence of better evidence at hand 

 they made a most unwarranted and 





extravagant use of anecdote, supplemented 

 at best by casual observations of the 

 natural history type. 



Like his great predecessor Aristotle, 

 Darwin was primarily a naturalist in the 

 broadest sense rather than a psychologist. 

 He was not well versed in traditional 

 psychology and had little or no acquaint- 

 ance with contemporary thought in this 

 field. He dealt with psychological prob- 

 lems only insofar as they came within the 

 province of his larger interest in biological 

 evolution. We are not surprised, there- 

 fore, to find him accepting in an uncritical 

 manner the terminology of the popular 

 psychology of his day. In his treatment 

 of the mental life of animals he was naively 

 anthropomorphic in much the same vein 

 as Aristotle and made much the same 

 conservative use of anecdote. Neverthe- 

 less, it is almost impossible to over- 

 estimate the influence of his genius on the 

 general field of psychology. The evolu- 

 tionary concept gave unity and meaning 

 to such disconnected facts as had been 

 accumulated, and led in time to an exten- 

 sive use of the genetic method and to- the 

 functional vs. structural interpretation of 

 psychological phenomena. 



The view of Darwin that "the mental 

 faculties of man and the lower animals do 

 not differ in kind, though immensely in 

 degree" was highly revolutionary in 

 nature. Orthodox science as well as 

 orthodox theology still held tenaciously 

 to the Hebrew cosmology and insisted 

 upon the immutability of species. And 

 this, in spite of the evolutionary teachings 

 of Buff on, Lamarck and many of the 

 leading philosophers of the preceding 

 century. Moreover, the conception pre- 

 vailed that the mental life of infra-human 

 organisms could be summed up in the 

 term instinct- — a biological faculty, or a 

 mysterious entity constituting the primal 

 psychical endowment of a beneficent 



