Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/471

Rh having reduced a conscious experience to simpler terms, the process of reconstruction begins. The functions and processes that have been reduced to numerical terms are recombined in their several amounts and the integration when complete represents an individual in so far as that individual is typical. With the absolute and exhaustive description of the individual as such, science is not concerned. Typical minds thus derived are, so to say, minds of different length and breadth and thickness. They are analogous to the variable organs and functions of the body. Their scientific description differs from the crude characterizations which we pass upon our friends and enemies as the law of falling bodies differs from an observer's account of a balloonist's accident.

The steps, then, in the procedure of individual psychology are (1) the measurement of a group of mental processes or functions, (2) analysis for the discovery of elementary or fundamental differences, (3) integration of these differential factors, and (4) a classification of types; measurement, analysis, integration, description, a common and justified sequence in the general methodology of science. I Compare with this procedure the instances taken a few moments ago from the psychology of common sense—the method employed, let us say, by Pearson. The first and the last steps are combined ("conscientiousness" or "assertiveness" represents the type), analysis and integration are omitted, and an offhand estimate is substituted for careful measurement.

I fear that I have been tedious and that I have perplexed you overmuch with matters remote from your primary interests. My excuse is that I have given you in part a program for the future, and that methods in the making are notoriously self-conscious and awkward of expression. If it were ten years later doubtless I could display more product and vex you less with the process. I could, I have reason to believe, show you this psychological problem of ours, which already at the early stage of crude quantification has proved itself extremely fertile, in a much more mature and fruitful state.

Now that you have before you, in outline, the problem of mental inheritance, its debt to biology, and the present necessity—if the problem is to advance—for the analytical treatment of traits by a science of individual differences, let me in closing return to my earlier remarks touching the import of inheritance in human history. I urged that human knowledge and human obligation have grown out of proportion to human talent. So far as we can tell, the child of to-day possesses the same nervous system, the same sense organs, evinces the same instinctive tendencies, in short, develops with the same physical and mental equipment as the child of unnumbered generations ago. If, so far as education went, the primitive boy was ready for man's estate at