We may not know the final results, but every sincere and earnest seeker may have the peaceful assurance that he is on the open highway that leads to the noblest and the best.
The assurance of knowledge but makes clearer the revelations of faith.
That “absentee God”—of which Carlyle wrote, has been discerned as the Universal Intelligence, and equally Love and Law.
Among recent writers and books on the subject of psychology, Professor Hugo Münsterberg’s “Psychotherapy” occupies a very high place. It appeals especially to the physician, more familiar than others with morbid psychical states. Here I can look back on almost half a century of experience, the most active, in dealing with these cases.
But I am at present less concerned with mental pathology and therapy, than with the general psychological basis; the causative categories upon which they are based, and which occupy the first half of Münsterberg’s book.
Dividing the whole subject—the content of consciousness, all the faculties, capacities and powers, all processes and sequences—into two general groups or classes, the purposive and the causal, Münsterberg declares that “the causal view only is the view of psychology”; “the purposive view lies outside of psychology.” (P. 14.)
I hold, that without the purposive view equally included and co-ordinated, there can be no such thing as Scientific Psychology. Half views will hardly admit of synthetic generalizations.
The complete separation here instituted, between the purposive and causal factors, in itself, for purposes of definition and study, need not be objected to, if it were consistently carried out, which it is not. He so nearly pre-empts the whole ground for the causal, giving scant courtesy to the purposive, merely a few crumbs of comfort, so that it cannot be said to be ignored altogether, and drops the scientific method entirely in dealing with it; assenting to moral precepts and principles, without a clew to any scientific basis, that one must object to the name—Psychology—as being applied to it at all. It contains no hint of a “knowledge of the Soul.”
It is the Vito-Motor mechanism of the Mind. The Automatism of the elements, incidents, changes, and sequences of our states of consciousness; based upon, and including all that we know of physiology. Along these lines, Münsterberg’s work has probably never been equaled. It is concise, comprehensive, and exhaustive.
His physical, physiological, and mental syntheses are well-nigh complete.