34 Blaisdell—Suggestions for Psychological Study. 
ter. The phrase, “science of psychology” should be pronounced in a 
major key. In a curriculum of studies the designation “science” should 
certainly as much include psychology as geology or chemistry. The 
word “scientist”—barring the infelicity of its mongrel etymology, which 
makes it a pain to use it,— should not denote one more than the other. 
There is no reason why science should mean science of matter more 
than science of mind. College boys and university men should not be 
allowed to grow up with the paralogism bred into them that science is 
even by one whit of eminence a conquest of five senses—sight, hearing,, 
touch, taste and smell. 
Equally questionable is it whether science should not register sound¬ 
ings upon its scientific chart in regard to the word “observation.” One 
is tempted at times to wonder whether in the great eagerness after the 
discovery of new facts in the wide realm of the unknown, we have not 
not only fallen into mistaken views of the relation of the departments- 
of science to each other, but failed to hold proper balance of apprecia¬ 
tion as regards the very instruments of discovery themselves. If the 
five senses have, in whatever alliance, yielded up wonderful disclosures 
to the throbbing heart of the student, his wisdom lies in keeping due con¬ 
fidence in other means of approach to the arcana of things. We can 
often sail by looking at sun and stars or watching ocean currents; it is 
convenient to have in reserve the methods of dead reckoning. We must, 
remember that science is the concept of the whole universe, that there 
is really only one science, and that there are paths up the inland heights 
of that awful realm which no vulture’s eye hath seen. Is not con¬ 
sciousness, by which the phenomena of mind are cognized by mind, an 
implement of observation as trustworthy as the eye or the ear, or has it 
failed oftener the explorer who has used it? I am not now speaking of 
inferences, though one does not easily see why inferences from consci¬ 
ousness are more likely to be mistaken than inferences from the dis¬ 
closures of the telescope or the spectroscope, for they both stand on the 
same level of safety. I only speak of the facts of mind which are the 
subject matter of psychology, and suggest that, disclosed as they are in 
consciousness, they are as much matters of observation as the things 
which are learned under the acid or the hammer. While, as is fully rec¬ 
ognized, the physiological laboratory may be invoked as an ally to illus¬ 
trate and perhaps supplement them, they are facts of observation in 
consciousness, and their distinctness and fullness of disclosure entitle 
psychology to be classed with as much firmness as an observational sci¬ 
ence like physiology or natural history. There is no apparent justice in 
arrogating to physiological psychology exclusively the designation em¬ 
pirical psychology, as has been strangely done by some of late. It seems 
much like the forwardness of unripe intelligence, the crudity of a late= 
arrival in the realm of metropolitan science. 
Nor have we less reason to put questions to a disposition to speak of 
