Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/346

332 change for the worse, in the relation of man as "a living soul" to his Creator—God. Positive science—and Darwinism is in every way bound by the limits of positive science—will neither help nor hinder us in discussing the relation between two terms, both of which are outside its range.

In a word, we are as little prepared to consult Genesis on the order of the paleontological series as to ask the high-priests of modern science to solve for us the difficulties of our moral and spiritual life.—The Guardian.



N giving the name of Experimental and Comparative Psychology to the chair into which it has transformed its ancient chair of the Law of Nature and of Nations, the College of France has sought to give it a title broad and comprehensive enough to accommodate itself to all contingencies. To have called it physiological psychology would have made physiology too prominent, and the chair might then eventually have become a mere annex of that science. Physiologists have done much, but they have not done everything, for experimental psychology. An intelligent magistrate who has thoroughly studied the moral and mental state of criminals; a philosopher versed in ethnological or in animal psychology; a pedagogue who has observed human faculties from an educational point of view; a pure psychologist, acquainted to the bottom with all parts of the science, but capable of including them in a single philosophical synthesis—might all compete for such a chair, which would not then be the exclusive domain of any one specialty. The real name for this science would be objective psychology, if that term were not too pedantic for common use. There are, in fact, two psychologies: one which is constructed by the inner sense, and is the basis of the other, which might be called subjective psychology; and the other formed by outward observation by the study of other men and of animals, or of the nervous system, which is the objective psychology of which we are speaking. The second psychology has always existed to a greater or less extent; but it is something new to treat it in and for itself, disengaged from the other, and to constitute it an independent science. One among the different parts of which it is composed seems to be more advanced than the others, and more nearly ready to claim to be a positive science. It is physiological psychology, or the science that studies the organic and physiological conditions of the mental faculties; and it 