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, 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!
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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 foetal 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."
[Illustration: 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 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.