The New Psychology

       Table of Contents

      Bacon's dictum regarding the proneness of the mind, in explanation, towards unity and simplicity, at no matter what sacrifice of material, has found no more striking exemplification than that offered in the fortunes of psychology. The least developed of the sciences, for a hundred years it has borne in its presentations the air of the one most completely finished. The infinite detail and complexity of the simplest psychical life, its interweavings with the physical organism, with the life of others in the social organism,-- created no special difficulty; and in a book like James Mill's Analysis we find every mental phenomenon not only explained, but explained by reference to one principle. That rich and colored experience, never the same in two nations, in two individuals, in two moments of the same life,-- whose thoughts, desires, fears, and hopes have furnished the material for the ever-developing literature of the ages, for a Homer and a Chaucer, a Sophocles and a Shakespeare, for the unwritten tragedies and comedies of daily life,-- was neatly and carefully dissected, its parts labeled and stowed away in their proper pigeon-holes, the inventory taken, and the whole stamped with the stamp of un fait accompli. Schematism was supreme, and the air of finality was over all.

      We know better now. We know that that life of man whose unfolding furnishes psychology its material is the most difficult and complicated subject which man can investigate. We have some consciousness of its ramifications and of its connections. We see that man is somewhat more than a neatly dovetailed psychical machine who may be taken as an isolated individual, laid on the dissecting table of analysis and duly anatomized. We know that his life is bound up with the life of society, of the nation in the ethos and nomos; we know that he is closely connected with all the past by the lines of education, tradition, and heredity; we know that man is indeed the microcosm who has gathered into himself the riches of the world, both of space and of time, the world physical and the world psychical. We know also of the complexities of the individual life. We know that our mental life is not a syllogistic sorites, but an enthymeme most of whose members are suppressed; that large tracts never come into consciousness; that those which do get into consciousness, are vague and transitory, with a meaning hard to catch and read; are infinitely complex, involving traces of the entire life history of the individual, or are vicarious, having significance only in that for which they stand; that psychical life is a continuance, having no breaks into "distinct ideas which are separate existences"; that analysis is but a process of abstraction, leaving us with a parcel of parts from which the " geistige Band" is absent; that our distinctions, however necessary, are unreal and largely arbitrary; that mind is no compartment box nor bureau of departmental powers; in short, that we know almost nothing about the actual activities and processes of the soul. We know that the old psychology gave descriptions of that which has for the most part no existence, and which at the best it but described and did not explain.

      I do not say this to depreciate the work of the earlier psychologists. There is no need to cast stones at those who, having a work to do, did that work well and departed. With Sir William Hamilton and J. Stuart Mill the school passed away. It is true that many psychologists still use their language and follow their respective fashions. Their influence, no doubt, is yet everywhere felt. But changed conditions are upon us, and thought, no more than revolution, goes backward. 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, orHarvey the physiological.

      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.

      Again, the history of all science demonstrates that much of its progress consists in bringing to light problems. Lack of consciousness of problems, even more than lack of ability to solve them, is the characteristic of the non-scientific mind. Problems cannot be solved till they are seen and stated, and the work of the earlier psychologists consisted largely in this sort of work. Further, they were filled with the Zeitgeist of their age, the age of the eighteenth century and the Aufklärung, which found nothing difficult, which hated mystery and complexity, which believed with all its heart in principles, the simpler and more abstract the better, and which had the passion of completion. By this spirit, the psychologists as well as the other thinkers of the day were mastered, and under its influence they thought and wrote.

      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.

      It will be of more use briefly to notice some of the movements and tendencies which have brought about the change of attitude, and created what may be called the "New Psychology."

      Not the slightest of these movements has been, of course, the reaction of the present century, from the abstract, if clear, principles of the eighteenth, towards concrete detail, even though it be confused. The general failure of the eighteenth century in all but destructive accomplishment forced the recognition of the fact that the universe is not so simple and easy a matter to deal with, after all; that there are many things in earth, to say nothing of heaven, which were not dreamed of in the philosophy of clearness and abstraction, whether that philosophy had been applied along the lines of the state, society, religion, or science. The world was sated with system and longed for fact. The age became realistic. That the movement has been accompanied with at least temporary loss in many directions,