Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/32

28 clinical investigator of abnormal conditions in the variegated and little understood field of the so-called psychic automatisms, obsessions, hysteria, 'multiple personality,' hypnotism, etc., whose penetrating analyses and fertile hypotheses have done much to bring unity and order into the chaos of phenomena presented. Dr. Morton Prince, an exceedingly clever Boston alienist, known also as a philosopher, offered an interesting array of facts from the field of the subconscious, which he subjected to an illuminating analysis. This section was particularly fortunate in having for its secretary an eminent alienist who has brought the methods and results of neurology and pathological anatomy, of physiology and psychology, together with clinical observation, to bear on a truly biological investigation of insanity—Dr. Adolf Meyer, of the New York State Pathological Institute.

One of the most interesting sessions was that for experimental psychology, in which a fundamental question of definition—far-reaching in its consequences for psychological research—was brought to a sharp issue in a fruitfully polemical address by Professor E. B. Titchener, Cornell's learned and thorough experimental psychologist, who has made a profound impression, not only upon a loyal group of students, but among psychologists everywhere, by reason of the distinctive point of view to which he has consistently adhered, no less than for the contagious enthusiasm of his devotion to the ideals of the experimental method. Titchener, after a masterly review of the present needs of experimental psychology, felt obliged to insist in sober earnest that psychology is in essence introspective, that introspection should be at the core of every psychological experiment, and that only those investigators who are concerned directly with conscious processes are properly psychologists at all, although it was conceded that much useful work—useful even for psychology sensu stricto—might be done by those who approach the subject more objectively, in the spirit of physiology or of biology, or, on the other side, from the standpoint of the theory of knowledge.

The interest attaching to the particular form which the discussion took before the experimental psychologists was enhanced by the fact that other psychologists had already, in their divisional and departmental addresses, favored the congress with their respective psychological creeds. For Hall, introspection was an almost anomalous byproduct of evolution, for Cattell, only one of the methods of psychology. If Hall defined his science in terms of his general philosophy or Weltanschauung, and Titchener in terms of its most distinctive feature, Cattell may be said to have defined it inductively, in terms of the concrete interests of working psychologists as measured by their output. His was both a reasoned plea for a deliberate eclecticism in research, pending the adjustment of philosophical difficulties not easily banished, and a defense of a frank opportunism which has proved its usefulness. Ward's interests are apparently antipodal to Hall's. He