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.

Most men live in and by their feelings; the intellect is individual, accidental, occasional, while the heart is the inner divinity which deals with wholes. It is one of the chief means through which ancestral experience is organically transmitted, and is the only truly common language between genius and the lout, between the old and the young. Very many insanities begin, in their pre-asylum stages, not in illusions or any distinctively mental disorders, but in emotional perversities or instabilities. Thus the doctor, the sanitary officer, advises for every few students, as at Oxford, faculty visitation, as formerly in the American college; the professors of physical culture and of ethics need [p. 247] to coöperate to help solve problems in vital economy which each man, later in life, has to solve for himself, and to make men great with the hands and feet; though we need not say, with Pindar, that no others are great. These statements are now almost commonplace in psychiatric literature.

Shall these great teachers be allowed to take their secret with them, when already in many of our colleges it is a pressing problem to find men of simple, quiet dignity; and poise of character, earnest in spirit and moral purpose, of solid even if of  less extensive acquirements, without hyper-subtlety or pedantic or morbid self-consciousness, to introduce undergraduates to ethico-philosophic studies; men who shall gain and keep access to and if needful guide their hearts and wills as well as their intelligences, [p. 245] -- something perhaps as an ideal parent or father confessor might  do,-- and all of course without rudely unsettling the religious convictions and habits of mind, whatever these may be, on the stability of which character itself is so often dependent?

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. This long experience is integral to the nature of youth and is favored by collegiate leisure and retirement from competition and the necessity of production. College journals often exhibit its expression, though almost always covered by some kind of semi-affectation.  As they struggle up for expression, the constitute some of the very best things in literature, and have strange power, if not too early extinguished by the pressure of facts, to keep life green, fresh in a good sense, and growing to the end. They are the springs of philosophic self-consciousness and ideality in general, of reverence, dependence, adoration, in which religion and morality have a common root. When the ideas begin to shoot they are often toyed with. The sudden sense of boundless freedom is like emancipation to the negro. The sutures and fontanelles of the brain open in vulnerable spots for skepticism and error, and really good minds often pass through phases of romance and sentimental musings before reaching a procreant maturity which at last nothing can overwhelm

The energy of the instinct of idealization must not be misdirected or overdone ; it must not lead men off the proper basis of their own true nature, still less counter to it. 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. [p. 241]

These three spheres of thong-lit, to tracing the details of which through the various systems the history of philosophy is devoted, are still to a great extent unharmonized.  The psychologist, at least, is not satisfied with any attempt to reduce the categories to an organic unity of consciousness. The Greek conception of form and the self-affirmation of Protestantism are now seen to be segments of a larger orbit of thought than this.

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.

Historical psychology seeks to go back of all finished systems to their roots, and explores many sources to discover the fresh, primary thoughts and sensations and feelings of mankind. These some are seeking in the stages of individual development from the earliest infancy up through the ferment and regeneration of the prolonged period of adolescence. Others develop the tact to extract them at first hand from savage races, among whom their traces grow more sacredly secret as tribes lose their ethnic originality. Others elaborate them from the history of the meanings of words and from folk-lore; while yet others are critically reconstructing them by long comparative study of all the recorded habits,  beliefs, rites, taboos, oaths, maxims, ideals of life, views of death, family and social organizations, etc.;-- in short, not only from the entire field of the muthos or logos, but from what Maurice calls, the ethos, and Grote the nomos of extinct civilizations.

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.

Experiment and disease show that there are psycho-neural processes localized in fibres that can be approximately counted,-- as those of the optic nerve and the cervical cord have been,-- and dependent on the integrity of specific cell groups, which no one who knows the facts, now easily shown, could think due only to an imponderable principle mediating freely between parts without necessitating connection of tissue.

Consciousness itself was first subjected to methods of exact experiment by E. H. Weber, who published the results of nearly twenty years of the most painstaking observations on the senses [p. 125] of touch and pressure in a monograph of almost ideally perfect form, written and rewritten in German and Latin, more than fifty years ago, and who wrought out the first form of the psycho-physic law, the exact application of which is now reduced to very narrow limits.

. 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.

Most of the voluminous literature on this subject in our libraries is of little scientific worth. It is about as illogical to say, either in the sense of the Stoics or of Descartes, that what seems sensation and intelligence in animals is really mechanical, as it is to reason from their unconscious wisdom to a world-soul guiding toward an unknown pole of human destiny and making history in fact very different from the history of man's purposes; or to revere them, as Herder did, as nearer to God than man is, or as teachers of medicines and many arts; or even to practice augury from their greater wisdom or finer senses, as perhaps transmigrated souls

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,-- if philosophy is to strike root in such soil and season and thrive in an air so bracing, it should, I strongly believe, take on some new features, may attempt some scientific [p. 121] results beyond exposition, and must satisfy some of the crying educational and religious needs of our nation. With your indulgence, then, I will roughly and hastily sketch the present condition of the department:--