A PLEA FOR PSYCHOLOGY AS A 'NATURAL SCIENCE.'
IN the first number of this journal, Professor Ladd takes my Principles of Psychology as a text for certain critical reflections upon the cerebralistic point of view which is becoming so popular in psychology to-day. I appreciate fully the kind personal tone of the article, and I admit that many of the thrusts strike home, though it shocks me a bit, I confess, to find that in some particulars my volumes have given my critic so false an impression of my beliefs. I have never claimed, for instance, as Professor Ladd seems to think I claim, that psychology as it stands to-day, is a natural science, or in an exact way a science at all. Psychology, indeed, is to-day hardly more than what physics was before Galileo, what chemistry was before Lavoisier. It is a mass of phenomenal description, gossip, and myth, including, however, real material enough to justify one in the hope that with judgment and good-will on the part of those interested, its study may be so organized even now as to become worthy of the name of natural science at no very distant day. I hoped that my book would leave on my readers an impression somewhat like this of my own state of mind. I wished, by treating Psychology like a natural science, to help her to become one. But what one book may have said or not said is a matter of small moment. My two volumes are doubtless uncouth enough; and since Professor Ladd wrote his article my general position has probably been made more clear in the abridgement of them, which Messrs. Holt & Co. have recently published under the name of 'Psychology: Briefer Course.'[1] Let us drop the wearisome book, therefore, and turn to the question itself, for that is what we all have most at heart.
- ↑ See especially the chapters headed 'Introductory' and 'Epilogue.'
