flavour; much more 01 it is useiul, as crude psy- psychology. chological material; much, hov^ever, is scientifically worthless, owing to the observer's lack of psycho- logical training. Two things are now wanted in child psychology: first, many more detailed studies of individual children, from birth onwards; and, secondly, a thorough study of the child mind from above downwards, — i.e., from the youth of, say, sixteen down to the infant. We do not know at what age introspection becomes possible: but it is certainly possible at sixteen. Working from that age downwards, we should pass through all stages: u 290 Province and Relatiojis of Psychology Child and adult psychology.
The old animal psy- chology from an introspection that is adequate to any mental process, however complex, to an introspection that can cope only with the simpler asrsociations and perceptions; and from this, again, to total lack of introspection, — to the stage at which reliance must be placed upon the observer's interpretation of the movements that express feeling and idea, and no assistance at all can be obtained from the subject.
Something of value for child psychology may be gained, perhaps, from the study of reminiscent autobiographies (J. S. Mill, Tolstoi, Loti) and of artistic interpretations of childhood (Pater, Dickens, Goethe). But it is very diffi- cult, in such cases, to distinguish the Wahrheit from the Dichtung, How far child psychology will be able to repay its debt to standard psychology, — how much a know- ledge of it will eventually contribute towards the understanding of the adult mind, — cannot be cer- tainly predicted. But the genetic method has proved fruitful in many departments of scientific enquiry; and as psychology is now a science, and each and every division of it may be approached by scientific methods, we are apparently justified in expecting that the study of the child consciousness will, sooner or later, yield results of high psychological value. In-, deed, such a belief is almost forced upon us, when we remember that the child mind is the direct precursor of the adult mind, the one passing into the other in an unbroken continuity of mental experience.
§ 1 19. Animal Psychology. — '' The question whether or not the animals possess a mind," wrote a philoso- pher of eminence in the first half of the eighteenth § IIQ. Animal Psychology 291 century, " is a question of no particular importance: I shall not dispute it, but leave the reader undisturbed in his own opinion." While the professional psy- chologists gave small attention to the matter, however, anecdotes of animal intelligence were industriously col- lected by the laity, — by amateur students of natural history and by the possessors of pet animals. To these collections the modern psychologist has fallen heir; but the inaccuracy of the observations, and the intermingling of fact with popular psychology which characterises them, render the legacy well-nigh valueless.
On the other hand, there is now good hope that and the new. animal psychology, learning the lesson of scientific caution from current investigation of the human mind, will gradually raise itself to the dignity of a science. The importance of the study, in view of the general doctrine of evolution, is very great, and many workers have recently been attracted to it. j Two results have followed.
(i) It is being recognised that animal psychology Modern must be built up from detailed enquiries, not from ^°^ a survey of the whole field of ' instinct ' or * intelli- gence '; that the work must be done little bit by bit, and the separate facts impartially recorded, without any preconceived theories of their meaning. Thus we have monographs dealing with the actions of single-celled organisms (§ 74), with the behaviour of newly hatched birds and new-born mammals, with the movements that express emotion (p. 16 step.) and impulse in animals, etc. All this is good material.
(2) Along with the change in method of observa- method.
292 Province and Relations of PsycJiology tion has come a change in method of interpretation. The actions of animals must be interpreted in the light of human actions, by reference to human psy- chology; and every action must be interpreted as simply as possible. Nothing must be taken as evi- dence of judgment which can in any way be explained by association of ideas; nothing ascribed to active imagination which can be accounted for by passive. This is a sound method, and has already borne fruit. Among other things, it has given us a more correct appreciation of the phenomena of instinct {^ 75) than was possible for the older psychology.
It may seem, at first sight, that the method is unfair; that the animal should have the benefit of the doubt in cases where an action is observed whose motive, in man, might be either judgment-impulse or simple impulse. The supposed unfairness disappears, however, when we look at a test case, like that of articulate speech. If the higher animals, despite their power of articulation, have never developed a spoken language, that must be because they have nothing to say; and if they have nothing to say, their minds are on an altogether lower level than ours. Hence, on the assumption that the animal and the human mind represent different phases of the same course of evolution, it is entirely reasonable to believe that the former ^ works ' in the simplest possible way. The belief is confirmed, if confirmation is necessary, by the fact (insisted on in Ch. XL) that men, who ca7i think, rarely do so; they take mental short cuts, borrowed associations, whenever they find them to hand. But if we shun mental effort, all the more do the animals avoid it.
Processes of § I20. Ethnlc Psychology. — Ethnic psychology is mhid^^^^^^ the psychology of a 'collective' mind, i.e., of the mental processes that are set up by the communion of individual minds; the psychology of a race or society or professional class, as distinguished from the psychology of the individual, child or man. It need hardly be said that the elementary processes of the individual and collective minds are the same: the collective mind has no existence apart from the minds of the separate members of the community. But when many individual minds come into contact, new complex processes take shape; the elementary processes are put together as they would not have been had mankind lived solitary lives.
The problem of ethnic psychology, then, is to The problem trace the development of these new mental com- psychology. plexes, and to explain them by reference to the conditions of social living. A good deal has been done towards the solution of this problem: scattered discussions will be found in works upon history, an- thropology, jurisprudence, philology and aesthetics, as well as in the psychologies. It cannot be said, however, that ethnic psychology exists to-day as a science; there is no special group of books devoted exclusively to it, as there is, e.g.^ to mental pathology, child psychology and animal psychology.
Ethnic psychology has four main divisions. It has to deal (i) with the growth of language. We Language. have already spoken of the importance of language to psychology in § 88, which thus anticipates the present Section. It has to deal (2) with the develop- ment of myth. The primitive myth, the story told of Myth, gods made in the image of man, is the germ both of religion and of science. Myth also afforded mate- rial for art.
294 Province and Relations of Psychology Anthropo- Primitive man looked upon his surroundings from a purely morphism of j-^^^^n Standpoint; that is, he made men of all the objects primitive..
man. around him. If a stone tripped him, it was an enemy that lay in wait for him in the shape of a stone; if a bough struck him, the enemy had taken the form of a tree to sur- prise him. The gods were simply men of more than human power. Sometimes they were dead chiefs, haunting the places that they frequented during life, and revealing their will in dreams; sometimes they were embodied in the vari- ous phenomena of nature, the storm-cloud, the wind, the sun, etc. Only by very slow degrees was the knowledge attained that the course of nature is not capricious but uniform; that there are laws of natural events. And not till this knowledge had been acquired was any separation made between natural science and religion.
The deeds of the gods and of the descendants of the gods, the heroes, were celebrated in poetry and in drama (or rather in a primitive mixture of these two forms of art) at a very early period. At the same time, it is not probable (as we shall see) that art arose out of myth.
Custom. Ethnic psychology has to deal (3) with the development of custom. Primitive custom — the customs of burial and marriage, the ceremonies connected with tillage and harvesting, etc. — is the root of cus- tom proper, of law and of morals. The customs of modern society are partly useful actions {e.g., the eating of meals at fixed hours), partly survivals oir older modes of thought and conduct, which persist merely because there is no imperative reason for giving them up {e.g., the wearing of finger rings). Law is custom regulated by the state for the welfare of the majority of its members. Morality is cus- tom regulated by ^public opinion,' by the approval and disapproval of the community. The spheres of § I20. Relation of PsycJiology to Etiiics mid Logic 295 law, religion and morals naturally overlap to a con- siderable extent in all forms of society.
Lastly, (4) ethnic psychology has to deal with the Art. growth of art, regarded as the play of the adult (§ 100). Some psychologists regard the aesthetic as a sub-form of the religious sentiment, and would therefore derive art from myth. The question cannot at present be decided; but it seems probable that art is as distinct from myth as myth is from custom.
The farther back we go in the history of humanity, the more difficult does it become to separate the products of the collective mind, — to say: this belongs to mythology, this to aesthetics, this to morals, this to custom. The primitive social mind, Hke the primitive individual mind (§ 48), is a one-tissue mind; differentiation means a rela- tively high stage of development.
In the case of art the difficulty is unusually great, owing The origin of to the variety of purposes which the aesthetic sentiment has aesthetic been made to serve (courtship, rehgion, play). It has been suggested that that is beautiful, to primitive man, which he regards as expressing a pleasurable emotion. We must / remember that anything (a tree, a weapon) might be thus regarded; for everything was interpreted after the human pattern. The beautiful woman was, then, the woman who expressed pleasure in the man's bodily adornment, the woman in whose face he read the reflection of his own pride; the beautiful landscape was the ' smiling' landscape; the beautiful jar or bow was that in whose look or action the mechanic refound his own self-satisfied pleasure; and so on.
The theory is plausible: it is as yet very far from proved.
§ 121. The Relation of Psychology to Ethics and Logic.
— Ethics is the science of conduct. Its problem is stated by Herbert Spencer in the following words: " I conceive it to be the business of Moral Science to deduce, 296 Province and Relatio7is of Psycliology The problem from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of ethics. Qf action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness. Having done this, its deductions are to be recognised as laws of conduct.''
Now it is clear that we cannot know * the laws of life and the conditions of existence ' in any other way than by a historical study of human society, by careful observation of the course of human evolution. The laws of life must be generalisations from the facts of life; the conditions of existence must be ascertained from the actual ups and downs of exist- ence at different periods. Or, to put the same thing in another way: rules of conduct can be laid down only after conduct itself, in all its phases and stages, has been described and explained.
The necessary preliminary to ethics, then, is the study of society: as Professor Wundt writes, ^*the straight road to ethics lies through ethnic psychol- ogy." Ethnic psychology is the connecting link between the sciences of mind and of morals. On the one hand, its facts must be interpreted in the light of individual psychology (§ 117); on the other, the facts as thus interpreted are the material from which the moralist abstracts those general principles of living whose consequences are to be taken as rules or norms of conduct. Psychology is the foundation^ of ethics; and not a few old-time ethical controver- sies are settled, once and for all, by appeal to it.
Theprovince Logic is sometimes defined as the * science of ogic. thought.' A better definition would be * science of the meaning or validity (soundness, justness, well- groundedness) of thought.'
Ethics and ethnic psy- chology.
§ 121. Relation of PsycJiology to Etliics and Logic 2(^J We have seen that every perception and idea means something. The elementary processes are put together at the bidding of nature (§ 38); and to say that nature lays constraint upon mind is to give the biological account of the fact v^hich the psycholo- gist expresses by saying that mental processes ^mean.' What is 'meaning' in psychology is simply * forma- tion under stress of natural environment ' in biology. Psychology has to do, of course, with all the aspects of mind: the concrete mental processes which form the objects of psychological enquiry are groups-of-ele- mentary-processes-that-mean. Logic, now, abstracts Psychology from the processes that compose the perception or ^"^ °^^^* idea or judgment, and looks exclusively at the mean- ing-side of the complex. It does not care whether thought go on in terms of sight or hearing or touch; it is concerned only to discover whether the thought is valid, justified under all sorts and kinds of environ- mental conditions. It thus proceeds * formally ' or symbolically, like a sort of algebra; and, when it has gone so far as to formulate the laws of valid think- ing, deduces from them rules or norms of scientific thought and procedure, — as ethics deduces norms of conduct from the Maws of life.'
The relation of psychology to logic, then, is two- fold. On the one hand, logic arises by way of abstraction from psychology; a single aspect of the total psychological fact is made the basis of a special science. On the other hand, psychological investigation falls under the sway of logic; unless the method of psychology is logical, its results will be invalid.
298 Provmce and Relations of PsycJwlogy The problem of pedagogy.
' Normative ' disciplines.
Child psy- chology and pedagogy.
§ 122. The Relation of Psychology to Pedagogy. — The problem of pedagogy is to lay down rules or norms of education. Such rules may be derived from two sources: from the history of education and from child study. The history of education shows what rules have been successfully, and what unsuccessfully followed, at different periods and under various con- ditions; child study should show, in general outline, the relation that the child mind bears to the adult mind, and should therefore assist the adult educator to deal with child pupils.
Logic, ethics and pedagogy have, then, this much in com- mon, that all three are 7iormative disciplines; their task is to lay down rules, to prescribe norms of action. Logic has made most progress; ethics is still denied the name of science by some authors; pedagogy is only gradually approximating to scientific accuracy.
Pedagogy is sometimes defined, in round terms, as an * applied child psychology.' The definition is incomplete, since it makes no reference to the his- torical study of education. Even when this omission is supplied, however, it is liable to misunderstanding. In the first place, the abstract * child ' of psychology does not exist for education: the teacher has to face, not *the child,' but real children, Katie Jone^ and Tommy Smith. Psychology cannot deal with Jones-ness and Smith-ness, but only with child-ness. Science, indeed, can never be * applied' offhand: inventors tell us that no machine, however careful its theoretical planning may have been, will 'work' upon its first construction; all sorts of unforeseen disturbances occur when the theory is translated into § 122. Relation of Psychology to Pedagogy 299 bits of metal. And if this is true of the inorganic world, it is doubly true of the world of mind.
The author of a recent psychological text-book, arguing from the fact that attention is intermittent (§ 36), declares that " in learning anything by heart, we learn best *by spurts.'" Yet experiment has shown that we learn best by reading the passage through steadily, again and again, from end to end, as if the attention were continuous! So complex are the conditions that determine a particular result, and so difficult is it to travel from theory to application, even within the limits of a single science.
In the second place, the teacher has to deal with a number of children together, with a class. Now the * abstract ' child of psychology is an individual child, — just as the abstract adult mind that we have dis- cussed in this book is an individual mind. And it is impossible to pass, at one step, from the individual child of psychology to the class-room child — the ' average ' or social child — of pedagogy.
We may, perhaps, say that child psychology stands to education as analytical mechanics stands to carpentering. The more mechanics the carpenter knows, the more intelli- gently will he work, and the readier w411 he be w^hen emer- gencies arise and he is called upon to travel outside of his routine employments. But he has to translate his mechanics into terms of wood (the abstract becomes the real child); and his wood- work is limited by the needs of house building and furnishing (the child must be taught in class). More- over, he learns in the workshop tricks of his trade (history of education) which on ordinary occasions are of more direct service to him than his theoretical study.
We conclude, then, that child study, when it has From theory become a science, when, i.e.^ it stands as the counter- part of adult psychology, and its conclusions tally throughout with the results of experimental intro- 300 Province and Relations of PsycJiology spection, will constitute one of the two sources from which the teacher may derive his norms of educa- tion; and the more gifted the teacher, the greater will be the benefit obtained. The road that leads from theory to practice must always be long and arduous. But those who are seeking to further the cause of education by the way of child study may hold fast to this hope: that just because the road is difficult, and just because the end is reached only by the chosen few, the reformation when it does come will be a reformation worth the accomplishing, a reformation whose effects will more than compensate for the misdirection of energy that marks a period of unschooled enthusiasm.
§ 123. Conclusion. — We took it for granted, at the outset, that psychology is a science. " At the end of our enquiry," we said (§ 2), *'we shall be able to look back...and see that psychology, so far as it has gone, makes up an orderly and systematic body of know- ledge." The enquiry is now ended, and the reader must judge whether or not this introductory state- ment was well founded. So much, at any rate, he will grant: that, if the foregoing Chapters have dealt adequately with mental problems, there is no fact oT mind, be it mental process or state of consciousness, that cannot be given its place by the side of other facts, with which it forms a coherent and self-consist- ent whole, — from which it derives and to which it imparts a significance that could not otherwise be attained.
On the other hand, our enquiry has been brief, and has covered a wide field. While we have indi- cated that psychology is not *^ a finished science; that there are yet many problems for the psycholo- gist to solve," w^e have not been able to enter upon any detailed discussion of controverted issues. The reader must turn for fuller treatment to larger and more comprehensive works: only after an extended study of these will he be able to pass a valid judg- ment upon the position that psychology holds among the sciences. He will find, ^ no doubt, plenty of * gossip and wrangle about opinions '; he will regret the time and labour wasted in 'contentions and bark- ing disputations.' But he will find, too, that the foundations of psychology are based upon the solid rock of fact; that, while m.uch remains to be done, much has been accomplished which will never require to be done over again.
A word of caution may be added here. Students of psychology are oftentimes puzzled and discouraged by the differences that they find between what appear to be equally authoritative text-books. One psychologist speaks of the method of experimental introspection; another discusses experiment, with but scant reference to introspection; a third emphasises introspection, while he says but little of experiment. One book makes great use of the logical terms ' discrimination,' ' integration,' ' comparison,' ' gen- eralisation,' etc.; another, as far as possible, avoids them. One author is never tired of insisting on the * activity ' of mind; another will hear nothing of activity. And so on.
Now it must be remembered, in the first place, that doubtful matters are, in the nature of things, more dis- cussed than are matters of fact. If we are all agreed about something, we need spend no words upon it; if we dis- agree, we must give reasons for our own belief and hear the 302 Province and Relatio7is of Psychology reasons offered by others for the adoption of a contrary- view. Hence, in many cases, there is an appearance of divergent opinion, although the contestants are in complete harmony upon fundamental points. The student must learn to distinguish between surface-differences and differences of principle.
Secondly, no science is finished, complete. Psychologists differ as regards method: so do physiologists. Psycholo- gists fall into two schools, according as they do or do not recognise a mental ' activity ': so do physiologists, accord- ing as they do or do not account for the phenomena of life in terms of physical and chemical laws. But physiology is a science, whether an.individual physiologist be a vivisec- tionist or an anti-vivisectionist, a ' mechanist' or a ^vitalist.' And psychology may be a science, despite the similar dif- ferences of psychological schools. To appreciate a psy- chological text-book, you must try to think yourself into the standpoint of the writer, to see how he conceived of the task before him, in what guise the separate problems presented themselves for solution. Reading in this spirit you are able (i) to estimate the internal coherence of the writer's system, to decide whether he is self-consistent or self-contradictory, and (2) to judge of its total value as a system, to compare the new method and the new point of view with your own, and decide which of the two is the more fruitful and the more scientific. There are very few books from which something may not be learned; there are none which need confuse you, if you approach them in this way.
Thirdly, however, there is a much more substantial agree- ment in questions of psychology than appears from the psy- chological text-books. Psychology has but very recently shaken itself free of philosophy, of metaphysics; and many psychologists still think it necessary to treat of metaphysical and psychological problems together. Thus the difference of opinion with regard to mental activity is a difference of philosophical, not of psychological belief; it is a difference Qicestions a^td Exercises 303 that can never be resolved by psychological methods. When, therefore, you find disagreement among psychologists, you must ask yourself whether the point at issue is psychological or philosophical. If it is philosophical, its discussion is irrelevant, and may be ignored in your appreciation of the psychological work of the writer.
Questions and Exercises (i) Suppose that, wishing to trace the development of a child's mind, you kept records of its use of words and of its progress in drawing. What precautions would you take, to have the records clear of error?
(2) Are there, in customs and usages of the present day, any survivals of the anthropomorphic mythology of primitive man?
(3) How can it be that one ^ learns by heart ' better by reading the passage through, again and again, — i.e.^ by distributing widely the repetitions of each part of it, — than by committing to memory a few lines or words at a time?
(4) Make a Table, in the form of a genealogical tree, showing the interrelation of the various psychologies, and the relation of psychology as a whole to ethics, logic and pedagogy.
(5) Compare (i) the senile with the child mind, (2) the mind of the adult savage with that of the civilised child, and (3) the mind of the adult savage with that of the civilised man. Com- pare your present answer to (i) with your answer to Question (6), p. 23. Are you now more capable of introspection than you were when you began the book?
(6) What is the original meaning of the phrase ' law of nature '? How has that meaning been modified?
(7) Can psychology ever become a normative science?
(8) What stages can you distinguish in a child's acquisition of language? Does it, eg.^ use substantives before it uses verbs, or vice versa? What is the psychological importance of a know^- ledge of these stages?
(9) Explain the following actions in the simplest possible way: {a) '^ When a small object is thrown on the ground beyond the reach of the elephant, he blows through his trunk on the ground beyond the object, so that the current reflected on all sides may drive the object within his reach.'''
304 Province and Relations of Psychology {b) '' Hearing a loud knock at the front door, I was told not to heed it, as it was only the kitten asking admittance. I watched for myselfj^and very soon saw the kitten jump on to the door, hang on by one leg, and put the other fore paw right through the knocker and rap twice. ^' {c) '' I knew a large dog that was very fond of grapes, and at night used to slip his collar in order to satisfy his propensity. It was not for some time that the thief was suspected, owing to his returning before daylight and appearing innocently chained up in his kennel."
(^) " Some of the old bucks get the berries from the thorn- trees in this way. They will raise themselves on their hind legs, give a spring, entangle their horns in the lower branches of the tree, give them one or two shakes, and then quietly pick the berries up."
10. What evidence can you bring from language that makes for the theory of the origin of the aesthetic sentiment given in References James, Textbook^ pp. 327-329, 367-369, Epilogue.
Sully, Hitman Mind^ vol. I., pp. 10-13, 18-22; vol. II., ch. xix., App. G, H, K, L. See also Index, references to ^ child,' Wundt, Lectures, Lects. XXIII., XXIV., XXVII., XXVIII., XXX. Consult further the works of J. M. Baldwin, E. Barnes {Studies in Education, Stanford Univ.), G. S. Hall {Pedagogical Seminary and Ainer. Journ. of Psych.), G. Le Bon, T. W.
Mills {Trans. R. S. Canada), K. C. Moore {Psych. Rev., Romanes, M. W. Shinn (Univ. of California Studies), D.
Spalding {Macmillan^s Mag., 1873), J- Sully, F. Tracy.
APPENDIX APPARATUS AND MATERIALS [Pieces of apparatus not expressly mentioned in the Questions and Exer- cises are printed here in square brackets.]
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