THE FUTURE AND INFLUENCE OF THE NEW SCIENCE.
So much for the place and what is done there. Now, what is expected to come from this new psychology? “Do you fellows expect to invent patent ways of thinking?” was once asked me. Who can tell? Who, before Galileo, would have prophesied that man should weigh the stars or know their chemistry? Yet there is much ground for comparison between the position of physical science then and that of mental science now. The popular opinion of to-day is perhaps even less awake to the fact that the world of mental phenomena is a world of laws, susceptible to scientific experimentation, than was the day of Galileo to the similar conception regarding physical phenomena. Have the physical sciences changed aught for man since the sixteenth century? Then we must not forget how slow was the growth, and how long it took to arrive at the laws of gravity and of conservation, 407 not to mention those of evolution. Experimental psychology, as a systematic science, is almost younger than its youngest students. The mental laws are as fixed and as determinable as the laws of physics. Who then shall say what man shall come to know of mental composition, of the great mental universe, and of ourselves, its wandering planets, since minds may be known as well as stars!
PROFESSOR WILHELM WUNDT, OF LEIPSIC, FOUNDER OF FIRST PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY (1878).
But psychology will not have to wait till its greater laws shall be wholly established before she becomes of practical influence in common affairs. He who reads most thoughtfully to-day will most appreciate this truth. He who reads at all, reads of “individualism” as opposed to “socialism.” The Pope of Rome has declared that the “preoccupying” problem for active Christianity must now be the industrial problem. Every important treatise on the subject, appearing at present, admits that the crucial question of the industrial problem is an ethical problem, and every ethical treatise, that every ethical problem is a psychological problem. Two years ago the Roman Catholic Church established a psychological laboratory in its leading American college.
The Presbyterians the coming year will follow with a laboratory at Princeton. Psychology is no longer feared by religion, but is accepted, though in places yet too timidly, as a source of its further and unending revelation.
PRESIDENT G. STANLEY HALL, FOUNDER OF FIRST PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY IN AMERICA.
But psychology is coming close to affairs of church and state in more than one way. One of the greatest crimes of modern society is its conception of criminal jurisprudence. Between the fœtal period and adult life man passes through, in abridged series, all the degrees of evolution that have led up through the lower animal stages to his own. In early infancy, and even in childhood, he is not yet wholly man; not yet safely over the brute period of his lineal development. If the domestic calf and chicken spend their first days wild in the woods, this pre-domestic environment will seize upon and develop their pre-domestic traits; and these once set, no amount of domestic training will, thereafter, make calf or chicken anything else than a wild, untamable creature. The early instinctive periods of man’s progeny are more prolonged, more delicate, and more susceptible than those of lower animals, yet are of the same nature. If left to evil environment in early years the latent brute within him will surely lay hold of its own, and ripen the yet innocent child to a creature bearing the same relation to the moral and civilized man that the wild wolf does to the house-dog.
On the other hand, the wolf whose first lair is the hunter’s hearth, grows to share it lovingly with the hunter’s children. The government that ignores the hordes of children which crowd to-day the criminal quarters of its great cities, and abandons them to ripen their pre-civilized propensities under such evil influences, becomes itself the foster-father of its own crimes; nurses its own children to fill its poorhouses, and raises its own youths to fill its prisons. Psychology, if on mere ground of financial economy alone, will yet force criminal jurisprudence to begin its work before, rather than after, this early period of “unalterable penalty.”
PROFESSOR WILLIAM JAMES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
The benefits of a psychological training to the medical man are now so obvious as to make a knowledge of psychology imperative for every first-class 408 physician. The nervous activities are the regulating activities of every part of the body; and the brain embodies an ever-meddling three-fourths of the body’s whole neural energy. The mind is a play-house wherein the skilful physician now looks to observe the condition of the general system, and with growing precision even to read the working of such specific organs as the heart, the stomach, the bladder, and the liver.
The relation of our science to modern education has long passed from novelty to a recognized principle. A chair of psychology and a chair of pedagogy, side by side and hand in hand, is now the requisite of every institution of advanced learning. “To get up more ‘fads’? More patent methods?” It is only the ignorant now who ask these questions. Galton has shown that some men do their thinking in visual pictures—in memories of what they see; others, in memories of what they hear; others, in the memories of their own speaking. There is reason to suspect that the lightning-calculator’s speed is largely due to peculiar “image processes” used in his thinking, and that these could be taught if science could but catch his unconscious secrets. This in time will be done, and is but an instance of innumerable things that are sure to be accomplished. In the face of all present pedagogical fads and blunders we may yet say with confidence, of the mind, the instincts, the emotions, the conduct of man, individual and social, all is lawful; and the laws may be discovered. They are difficult—more difficult than all the physical laws achieved from Ptolemy to Darwin. But they can be scientifically determined and mastered, and modern methods, swift with gathering impetus, shall make of this no lingering matter.