Order of Topics. 
37 
3. A third question I have to raise is in reference to the proper order 
of topics in the study of psychology. It has seemed to me very strange 
that the treatment of psychology should persist in handling the func¬ 
tions of mind in the order of intellect, sensibilities and will. It of course 
suggests itself as a reason of this order that by the intellect are fur¬ 
nished the facts by which the sensibilities are awakened, and that in 
these the will finds its immediate motive of purpose. This is no doubt 
plausible, and is very likely the traditional reason of the order. Some 
writers in psychology have been controlled by a rhetorical reason, and 
have constructed their work on the principle of the law of rhetorical 
cadence. The exaggerated relative importance attached to the intellect¬ 
ual function of mind has not only led to giving intellect first place in 
treatment, but even to making it the exclusive topic, allowing at least 
small and insignificant attention to the executive powers, perhaps put¬ 
ting them over for consideration into the department of ethical science. 
It can easily be explained that one who is handling psychology in the 
interests of illustrating the evolution theory and setting forth a genesis 
of mind in that interest, as Hoefding and many others, will adopt that 
method. But no such reason can be assigned in the case of many 
writers. 
The preliminary question ought fairly to be discussed, which one of 
the two conceptions ought to rule in the teaching of science. Mr. Her¬ 
bert Spencer would no doubt answer, that the various sciences ought to 
be taught entirely in the interests of the one comprehensive natural 
procedure of the universe. Psychology has its worth and its interest 
for us as a stage in that cosmic procedure, and the sole dominating 
principle of its teaching is loyalty to this method of procedure. There 
is but one science in this view, that of evolution. 
Some others of us believe in the reality of final causes, and in a moral 
final cause, and that man’s being is determined by reference to that 
moral final cause, so that he is not only a stage in the cosmic series but 
a responsible actor in view of the series. Indeed, it would seem that 
man is hardly a co-ordinate stage in the series, but that the series is so 
related to him’that he is, so far as this world is concerned, its final cause. 
He seems to be protagonist in a system which constitutes his arena. We 
think him disengaged from the tyrannic current of natural processes, 
and that he has in himself, and not in nature, the law by which he is to 
be studied and estimated and held responsible. Indeed, if this is true 
of man, it is, in a related way, true of everything else. The question is, 
whether we are to hold everything as part of a stage of aimless nature, 
or as related to a final moral stage. I suspect that the real question 
which underlies our method of teaching at the present moment is squarely 
this, whether we are pupils of Herbert Spencer or of Socrates, or—to 
mention no other—of Jesus Christ. This, apparently, is the only issue 
which—whatever may have been the reason in the past, and with merely 
