it attempts to comprehend life.

The chief characteristic distinguishing it from the old psychology is undoubtedly the rejection of a formal logic as its model and test. The old psychologists almost without exception held to a nominalistic logic. This of itself were a matter of no great importance, were it not for the inevitable tendency and attempt to make living concrete facts of experience square with the supposed norms of an abstract, lifeless thought, and to interpret them in accordance with its formal conceptions. This tendency has nowhere been stronger than in those who proclaimed that "experience" was the sole source of all knowledge. They emasculated experience till their logical conceptions could deal with it; they sheared it down till it would fit their logical boxes; they pruned it till it presented a trimmed tameness which would shock none of their laws; they preyed upon its vitality till it would go into the coffin of their abstractions. And neither so-called "school" was free from this tendency.

The cradle and the asylum are becoming the laboratory of the psychologist of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The study of children's minds, the discovery of their actual thoughts and feelings from babyhood up, the order and nature of the development of their mental life and the laws governing it, promises to be a mine of greatest value. When it was recognized that insanities are neither supernatural interruptions nor utterly inexplicable "visitations," it gradually became evident that they were but exaggerations of certain of the normal workings of the mind, or lack of proper harmony and co-ordination among these workings; and thus another department of inquiries, of psychical experiments performed by nature, was opened to us, which has already yielded valuable results. Even the prison and the penitentiary have made their contributions.

The origin and development of myth, with all which it includes, the relation to the nationality, to language, to ethical ideas, to social customs, to government and the state, is itself a psychological field wider than any known to the previous century. Closely connected with this is the growth of ethical ideas, their relations to the consciousness and activities of the nation in which they originate, to practical morality, and to art. Thus I could go through the various spheres of human activity, and point out how thoroughly they are permeated with psychological questions and material. But it suffices to say that history in its broadest aspect is itself a psychological problem, offering the richest resources of matter.

the fact that all these sciences possess their psychological sides, present psychological material, and demand treatment and explanation at the hands of psychology.

This idea of the organic relation of the individual to that organized social life into which he is born, from which he draws his mental and spiritual sustenance, and in which he must perform his proper function or become a mental and moral wreck, forms the transition to the other great influence which I find to have been at work in developing the New Psychology.

The influence of biological science in general upon psychology has been very great. Every important development in science contributes to the popular consciousness, and indeed to philosophy, some new conception which serves for a time as a most valuable category of classification and explanation. To biology is due the conception of organism. Traces of the notion are found long before the great rise of biological science, and, in particular, Kant has given a complete and careful exposition of it; but the great rôle which the "organic" conception has played of late is doubtless due in largest measure to the growth of biology. In psychology this conception has led to the recognition of mental life as an organic unitary process developing according to the laws of all life, and not a theatre for the exhibition of independent autonomous faculties, or a rendezvous in which isolated, atomic sensations and ideas may gather, hold external converse, and then forever part. Along with this recognition of the solidarity of mental life has come that of the relation in which it stands to other lives organized in society. The idea of environment is a necessity to the idea of organism, and with the conception of environment comes the impossibility of considering psychical life as an individual, isolated thing developing in a vacuum.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in visual perception. It is already almost a commonplace of knowledge that, for example, the most complex landscape which we can have before our eyes, is, psychologically speaking, not a simple ultimate fact, nor an impression stamped upon us from without, but is built up from color and muscular sensations, with, perhaps, unlocalized feelings of extension, by means of the psychical laws of interest, attention, and interpretation. It is, in short, a complex judgment involving within itself emotional, volitional, and intellectual elements. The knowledge of the nature of these elements, and of the laws which govern their combination into the complex visual scene, we owe to physiological psychology, through the new means of research with which it has endowed us. The importance of such a discovery can hardly be overestimated. In fact, this doctrine that our perceptions are not immediate facts, but are mediated psychical processes, has been called by Helmholtz the most important psychological result yet reached.

What can be meant, then, by saying that the rise of this physiological psychology has produced a revolution in psychology? This: that it has given a new instrument, introduced a new method,-- that of experiment, which has supplemented and corrected the old method of introspection.

To illustrate: very many professed popularizers of the results of scientific inquiry, as well as laymen, seem to think that the entire psychology of vision is explained when we have a complete knowledge of the anatomy of the retina, of its nervous connection with the brain, and of the centre in the latter which serves for visual functions; or that we know all about memory if we can discover that certain brain cells store up nervous impressions, and certain fibres serve to connect these cells,-- the latter producing the association of ideas, while the former occasion their reproduction. In short, the commonest view of physiological psychology seems to be that it is a science which shows that some or all of the events of our mental life are physically conditioned upon certain nerve-structures, and thereby explains these events. Nothing could be further from the truth. So far as I know, all the leading investigators clearly realize that explanations of psychical events, in order to explain, must themselves be psychical and not physiological. However important such knowledge as that of which we have just been speaking may be for physiology, it has of itself no value for psychology. It tells simply what and how physiological elements serve as a basis for psychical acts; what the latter are, or how they are to be explained, it tells us not at all. Physiology can no more, of itself, give us the what, why, and how of psychical life, than the physical geography of a country can enable us to construct or explain the history of the nation that has dwelt within that country. However important, however indispensable the land with all its qualities is as a basis for that history, that history itself can be ascertained and explained only through historical records and historic conditions. And so psychical events can be observed only through psychical means, and interpreted and explained by psychical conditions and facts.

there has arisen a department of science known as physiological psychology,

Thus their work was conditioned by the nature of science itself, and by the age in which they lived. This work they did, and left to us a heritage of problems, of terminology, and of principles which we are to solve, reject, or employ as best we may. And the best we can do is to thank them, and then go about our own work; the worst is to make them the dividing lines of schools, or settle in hostile camps according to their banners. We are not called upon to defend them, for their work is in the past; we are not called upon to attack them, for our work is in the future.

The work of the earlier psychologists bore a definite and necessary relation both to the scientific conditions and the times in which it was done. If they had recognized the complexity of the subject and attempted to deal with it, the science would never have been begun. The very condition of its existence was the neglect of the largest part of the material, the seizing of a few schematic ideas and principles, and their use for universal explanation. Very mechanical and very abstract to us, no doubt, seems their division of the mind into faculties, the classification of mental phenomena into the regular, graded, clear-cut series of sensation, image, concept, etc.; but let one take a look into the actual processes of his own mind, the actual course of the mental life there revealed, and he will realize how utterly impossible were the description, much more the explanation, of what goes on there, unless the larger part of it were utterly neglected, and a few broad schematic rubrics seized by which to reduce this swimming chaos to some semblance of order.

Psychology can live no better in the past than physiology or physics; but there is no more need for us to revile Hume and Reid for not giving birth to a full and complete science, than there is for complaining that Newton did not anticipate the physical knowledge of to-day, or Harvey the physiological.

It is true that many psychologists still use their language and follow their respective fashions. Their influence, no doubt, is yet everywhere felt.