I have spoken with a frankness which, till lately, would have been almost like offering one's self as a corpus vile for vivisection, and may only add that, while the problem of undergraduate education in philosophy has been better solved in this country than ever before or elsewhere, and while instruction in the history of philosophy which should follow such studies is also being happily, if all too slowly, wrought out in a number of our best institutions, the still more advanced course I have tried briefly to characterize as historical psychology, to which all philosophical courses lead up in a university, has not yet found much representation in our country. Of the educational side of the work of this department,-- which is simply a field of applied psychology,-- and of its relations to advanced work in logic and ethics, I shall speak later. That the work of the department I have described will appeal irresistibly to young men, provided only it can have a representative here at all adequate, no one well read in the history of universities and their studies and dominant interests can doubt.

While the intellect may work correctly, with much physical infirmity, a single feeble part of the body cannot be without some ill effect on the sanity of sentiment, restricting the full and healthy flow of emotional life which nature seems to offer to no class of young men more certainly than to those entering upon college life. Not only during rapid growth, but for years after, the vital processes are directed to the body at large, the brain and mind are somewhat sluggish and retarded

Barbara Celarent

These men, generally presidents of the institutions in which they taught, conducting its discipline, gathering about them a faculty sympathetic with their own views of ultimate truth if not in some cases preparing the wav for it, sometimes began to instruct with systems more elaborate and theological than current fashions favor, and sometimes with almost none; but discussions with successive classes of men whose choice of a vocation as well as character and creed were often at stake slowly gave their convictions an earnestness, and at the same time an affinity and close and intimate reciprocity with student interests, ideals, aims, caused them to cease indoctrination alone, and made them true maieutic educators, subordinating all as means for enriching the minds, warming and elevating the hearts, steadying and strengthening the virtue and piety of their pupils.

scholares vagantes,

Half a dozen elected philosophy, or some branch of it, "so they could talk intelligently about it in society, without calling Democritus a sophist, or Cicero a contemporary of Kant;" "as one studies literature as part of a liberal education." A dozen more sought or found help toward their profession, as "aid in understanding insanity;" "power to persuade men ;" "help to faith for preaching;" " arguments to refute Spencer's agnosticism, materialism, etc." A few others found in it an aid to concentration, or "to increased analytic power; " help in understanding scientific problems;" "power to work easier;" to "make the best use of body and brain;" "ethical support to be a truer man;" a sense of "growth and expansion;" "escape from prejudice;" "tact to deal with men." Others found help about special problems that had puzzled them, more frequently evolution, theism, the Bible, the relation of men to animals, heredity, etc. More than four fifths of all, however, specified chiefly aid through what are now unmistakably recognized as adolescent crises and readjustments. They begin to "feel that an has two" and indeed "many sides;" they "realize an all-sided curiosity;" had dreamily but persistently "pondered" on  perhaps such single questions as: "What is space," "especially if infinite ?" "Why did the world exist?" "Who and what am I?" Why am I "I and no one else"? "What should I do, be, know?" They had "doubted nothing and now suddenly doubted all things," and found they were "not exactly themselves;" were moving about in a world not realized. What is the greatest happiness? "Are we free? and if so, how should we use our freedom?" What is the "ground of belief"? "Is common sense, after all, the best guide?" and, Are private "virtue and sacrifice rewarded"? Such are the questions in their terms that these young men ponder, as we have perhaps all done, and perhaps forgotten as the world  grew familiar to us. Nearly a score of half-morbid souls found or affected great distress at the deep unsettlement, and seek only peace of mind and surcease from such endless questionings and introspection, feeling a nervous horror either of some nameless "abyss of mental disaster," or from finding out that they actually agree at heart with some disapproved system. In a few extreme cases frequent changes of view had destroyed faith in their own mental [p. 242] power and in the stability of all ideal truth, or premature reading and forced teaching or thinking gave ample illustrations of the dangers of a very wide mental horizon for a feeble intellect, or of introducing immature minds to the great perennial controversies in the field of thought, because teachers forget that there are problems it is simply immoral for individual minds to open and that there is a mental indigestion that hurts the brain as truly as dyspepsia does the walls of the stomach. A few maturer minds were emerging happily and healthily from this prolong apprenticeship to life, and express themselves as having "obtained blessedness of an individual mental attitude," or "reached a few mild postulates" that "fit their constitution;" or having been "long at sea and now landed and in possession of a small spot of earth to till;" of having "studied and now being ready to produce, if but little;" of having found that "intellect is not all," and "cannot give the lie to conscience" or our deeper instincts; of having realized that what has troubled them has also seemed insoluble to all men; of beginning to realize a unitary mental world where knowledge once isolated is classed and utilized, old views confirmed, widened, and others dropped off; and of having realized that the revelations of life -- the feeling of love, death, paternity, etc. -- are, after all, the chief sources of all philosophy.

All this is very clear from the study I have lately made of the written answers of between three and four hundred seniors in six of our largest colleges to a series of questions respecting their philosophic interests, to be later reported on in full.

Because philosophy is sometimes no truer to literal fact than are the parables of Jesus, there is a saturation point, which there is danger of passing if all that is taught be not in the most sympathetic relation with that nine tenths of life which is so deeply stirred at this age, but which cannot and should not be fully brought into the narrow field of youthful consciousness.

parousia

psychology is content with the more definite field of being to the other disciplines of philosophy, and even ultimately to the humanities in general, what mathematics is to the more exact sciences, having its place among them wherever it can formulate fundamental relations more precisely, objectively, and in a way more surely and universally verifiable by others.

That deeper psychologic insights, in directions to which attention in this field is already turning, are to effect a complete atonement between modern culture and religious sentiments and verities is now becoming more and more apparent. The development of these insights will gravely affect the future of religion.

quœ supra nos, quid ad nos

ataraxia

tabula rasa

Descartes, who could not think except in visual and mathematical terms, and Borelli, by his great work on the motions or animals, and the iatro-mechanical school of medicine thus founded, which treated digestion as trituration, secretion as sifting. circulation as hydrodynamics, and nerve action as vibration, and made mathematics for a long- time the preliminary study of physicians, represents its "storm and stress " period.

From this standpoint we must regard the chief traditions or philosophemes in the history of thought, as three, now characterized somewhat as follows: The first took earliest shape under the obstetric art of Socrates as the concept, and was better defined by Plato's doctrine of ideas or forms. In another way it appears again in Aristotle's theory of categories, half deduced, half gathered from the agora, and which Kant assumed without criticism and with too little change; and later in the universals, innate ideas, exemplary forms and species of the schoolmen, as Hegel's diamond net-work, which made the universe real because it made it rational, as the pure entities in the artistic contemplation of which Schopenhauer thought the soul found its only surcease from pain, and even as the natura ipsissima of God himself, to know which was conscious immortality, while it is no less historically represented in the theory of fixed types in nature, which have constituted the chief obstacle which evolution has had to encounter in every field and form.

In view of all this we may say, not, I think, that psychology is all there is of philosophy, as Wundt does, nor even that it is related to the systems as philosophy to theology, nor that it is a philosophy of philosophy, implying a higher potence of self-consciousness, but only that it has a legitimate standpoint from which to regard the history of philosophy,-- a standpoint from which it does not seem itself a system in the sense of Hegel, but the natural history of mind, not to be understood without parallel [p. 131] study of the history of science, religion, and the professional disciplines, especially medicine, nor without extending our view from the tomes of the great speculators to their lives and the facts and needs of the world they saw. It strives to catch the larger human logic within which all systems move, and which even at their best they represent only as the scroll-work of an illuminated missal resembles real plants and trees, in a way which grows more conventionalized the more finished and current it becomes. In a word, it urges the methods of modern historic research, in a sense which even Zeller has but inadequately seen, in the only field of academic study where they are not yet fully recognized.

adolescence.

There is a vast mass of| reasoned truth in the past, acquaintance with which restrains young men from wasteful extravasation of thought, by holding them to the normal consciousness of the race, and yet at the same time deepens mental perspective and gives a wider comparative habit of mind, by rousing a love of many sides and points of view. A good teacher can secure this end without confusing inexperienced minds by conflicting theories and without danger of the depressive influence which comes from mere acquisition, or from more reading than reflection.

As German teachers slowly realized that the force of the great systems in vogue there half a century ago was spent, and that further progress in those directions was impossible, they came to see in [p. 129] how important a sense to know truly is to know historically, and rescued their department from decay by renouncing construction for the exposition and criticism of philosophic opinion in the past. To this work nearly half the courses in Germany in this department are now devoted, and philosophic curricula in tins country are becoming more and more historical, and with great gain.

The needs of the average student, however, are no doubt best served, not by comparative, or even experimental, but by historical psychology, which seems no less adapted to the need of humanistic than the former to those of scientific students.

Baconian, or, more historically, Roger Baconian, methods, after reconstructing thought in other fields, are at last being applied to the study of those qualities and powers by which man differs from animals, and which in medical study and practice have been of late far too much ignored, and by metaphysics far too exclusively considered

The department of psychology is in some sense new in this country as a university specialty.

Nothing is just now more needed or more promising here than a comparison of carefully taken psychic observations of cases of acute mania with the cortical discoloration which commonly attends it. The successful student of these states requires the rare combination of an insinuating, sympathetic temper, of a perhaps itself infinitesimally neurotic type, with power to trace all morbid psychic phenomena in others to and identify them with fainter experiences of his own, along with the most objective discriminating sagacity. The infection of these states is so subtle in imaginative minds and the katharsis so long and serious that they should be undertaken by the general student of psychology very rarely or [p. 128] not at all

But if all cells and fibres involved in each act of the mind or emotional state might be conceived to be numbered and weighed, and all the circulatory, thermal, chemical, and electrical changes exactly formulated, the sense of utter incommensurability between these objective relations and the closer, more intimate consciousness of such acts and states would be sufficient as a corrective of materialism and as a positive justification of an idealistic view of the world

The brain itself, the most complex and unknown of all the bodily organs, is now studied with as much specialization of both   field and method as modern astronomy. If in one patient the right arm is lost or paralyzed, and after death certain bundles of fibres and certain cortical areas are found decayed, the inference that they are connected is strong. It is still stronger it conversely in other patients brain lesion, by wound or tumor, causes loss of function in the arm; and stronger still, it these fibres acquire their medullary sheath before others around them in the embryo, and can be traced from the arm to the same part of the cortex, By the consilience of these methods, supplemented by physiological experiment on animals, and in part by patiently tracing normal fibres with the microscope, approximate localizations of brain centres for the movements of the legs and, especially, the arms now seem established. General centres for speech and, perhaps, vision, though subject to individual variation, and not sharply defined, now seem also made out.  Munk's distinction between central and penumbral spheres, Meynert's bold designation of the arched fibres that join convolutions as association fibres, a mild form of Goltz's theory of functional regeneration, the ascription of either commissural, reproductive, or balancing function to the cerebellum and of motor mediation mainly to the striate, and sensory to the thalamic body, seem, if less certain, and resting on very different kinds and degrees of evidence, now very probable.

When we add to this the rhythms, beginning perhaps fine intermittency in all nervous action, breaking vocal utterance into articulation, cadence, and rhyme, and widening into the larger periodicities now just beginning to attract attention in health and disease, it is plain at least that the old treatment of time as a simply form or rubric of the sensory was perhaps still more superficial than that of space, and that those who still persist in speaking of acts of human thought as instantaneous, or even independent of time, may be asked to demonstrate at least one such act or thought.

The difficulties of experimenting on smell and taste, dizziness and the muscle sense, are being slowly overcome, and new sensations, such as local signs and innervation-feelings,-- no more accessible to direct experience than atoms,-- are postulated

The study especially of the retina -- genetically a part of the brain and in a sense the key to its mysteries and an index of its morbid states, itself now so accessible to observation, and its functions to experiment -- has enabled us to penetrate into the problems of visual form and color, and in connection with touch (under the long tuition of which vision is educated in our infancy, till it finally anticipates, abridges, and reduces its processes to a rapid algebra of symbols) has brought us into far closer quarters with the nature and laws of motion, reality, and space itself, than Locke, Berkeley, Hume, or Kant could penetrate. Not only physiological optics, but acoustics, is now almost a science by itself

There were speculators who objected that to give a solid structural basis to the distinction between sensation and motion, instead of admitting that all fibres mediated both, was to restrict the freedom of the soul, and to dualize, if not to phrenologize, it into a posterior and an anterior soul (rather than a right and a left brain-soul, functioning alternately, as Dr. Wigan had said). The researches on inhibition begun by Setschinow,-- so suggestive for the study of the negative field of attention if not of hypnotism, -- the light shed on the problem of automatism vs. a psychic rudiment by the observations of Marshall Hall and of Pflüger, the studies of Ludwig's school,-- again the most valuable in this field, and on the most mechanical hypothesis,-- Wundt's explanation of his observations,-- which, however conjectural, has the great merit of unifying many  partial hypotheses of ultimate nervous action,-- the ingenious experiments of Goltz, and scores of other special studies of various aspects of reflex action have cleared up and made more tangible many important psychic concepts.

More central, and reduced to far more exact methods, is the field of experimental psychology.  This properly begins in the physiology of the excised nerve and the striated or voluntary muscle. The action of the latter is the only exponent we have, except the wave of negative electrical variation, of what takes place during the transmission of a psychic impulse in the fibre which Henle thinks even more important for it than the nerve cell itself. For a long time after Galvani's discovery of the marvelous reanimation of these tissues by contact with two dissimilar metals, scientific men no less sagacious than Humboldt, who recorded two volumes of now worthless observations, thought themselves near a demonstration of vital force. The problems that thus arose really became accessible only after the invention of the multiplicator and the double astatic needle, which were first combined in their study by Nobilis in 1826.  Since then Du Bois-Reymond and Matteucci, whose work the former strangely underrates, and many younger investigators, have explored many effects of several stimuli under varied conditions, which no one interested in the study of voluntary movement can safely ignore. The facts are too complex and the theories at present too unsettled and conflicting for exposition here. Whether it be right or wrong, it is the hypothesis that the nerve-muscle preparation is only a mechanism with no vital principle in it, and could be made to give (although results have, it must be confessed, been often less exact than was hoped for) perfectly constant curves and currents if all its conditions a could be controlled, that has prompted nearly all work in this field.

What is now [p. 122] wanted here is many painstaking studies of single species or animals like Erber's long moonlight studies of trap-door spiders, Spaulding's experiments upon chickens on emerging from the shell Morgan's observations of beavers, Darwin's researches on the intelligence of earth-worms, Forel, Moggridge, McCook, and Lubbock on ants, such as, with a few dozen more of like method, constitute all the really valuable literature on the subject. Scientific ingenuity in devising methods of experimentation is perhaps nowhere greater or surer of fresh and valuable results which may be obtained by the study of any form of animal life about us.

Most of the voluminous literature on this subject in our libraries is of little scientific worth

In this high normal school for special professional teachers where so many fashions in higher education are now set, with a virgin field free from all traditions so apt to narrow this work, and just as we are entering an age when original minds in all fields are giving increased attention to its problems, and perhaps, as is now said from several high and impartial standpoints, to be known in the future as the psychological period of intellectual interest and achievement

We look in vain to the practice of its professed teachers in Europe or in this country, past or present, for any such agreement concerning its methods, problems, or scope as marks off work for other chairs, while sections of its acknowledged area are covered by a rank growth of popular idols and presuppositions long since eradicated elsewhere