Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/355

Rh the whole domain of mental pathology. Here is a vast field for study for which we are better equipped to-day than ever. There is certainly in it the material for a science, and consequently the basis for a system of instruction. Yet suspicions and scruples, explainable but exaggerated, have been raised against these new studies. It will be well to point them out and estimate them in order to fix, as far as possible, the principles of the question.

It is remarked, first, that physiological psychology is not yet a made and established science. It is, they allege, only a confused mass of doubtful facts and arbitrary opinions; only a collection of hypotheses that have no authority at all in science, and therefore no right to be taught. I admit that there is much in physiological psychology that is conjectural and arbitrary, and that there is too much haste to rush to conclusions and doctrine; but the assertion that there are no certain facts in it, nor a certain number of positive laws, or at least of legitimate researches, appears to me to be refuted by the preceding summary. There is, therefore, a science in a nascent state, a science in the course of formation. The question now is, whether such a science ought to be taught. Instead of seeing an objection in the transitory condition of the science, I see in it only an additional reason for teaching it. The nascent science is the one that needs to be taught. There was great reason for creating in the Faculty of Sciences the chair of Microbiology, although that science was only born yesterday, and changes from day to day to such an extent that the professor may often find himself between one day and another in the presence of unexpected facts that will constrain him to modify his previous assertions. But there was all the greater need of such a chair; for where could any one desiring to occupy himself with this science, and to work for its further progress, prepare himself for it? So with psycho-physiology. Suppose a young philosopher or physiologist, attracted by studies of this character, and wishing to devote himself to them; where could he learn the elements of this science? They are scattered in thousands of volumes of philosophy and medicine, where they are mingled with everything else. Only to examine these books is an infinite task. Add that they are not always easy to get, that no one has them all in his library, and that most of them are written in foreign languages; and, further, that frequently the most important facts are not in special books, but in the memoirs of academies, in the collections of scientific societies, and in scattered pamphlets; and all this without connection, unity, or method. How can any one acquaint himself with it without a guide, without a leading thread? The object of the new chair is to furnish such a guide. Teaching is, therefore, the precise thing necessary to bring the science out of the nascent state.