Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/156

150 problem as to the relation of body and mind in his works on hearing and seeing and on vision and music. Lotze, who has the credit of having banished the idea of vital force from the study of biology, has given especial attention to the study of the methods or rules of the psychophysical machine. But the most prominent and successful investigator in this special department of mental and physical study is Professor Wundt, of Leipzig. It is said of him that he combines in the methods he follows the truth found in Lotze's medical psychology and Helmholtz's physiology of hearing and seeing with valuable additions of his own. He approaches the study of mind from the side of physiology, but is careful to take into consideration the whole problem of mentality and thus avoid theories founded on the study of only a part of it. The older metaphysical psychologists explained "the unity and unified totality of all inner and mental phenomena" by assuming the existence of an independent entity, "the soul, the person, the self," at the beginning of their discussions. This modern psychology is unwilling to do. The unity of the inner life and its unified totality is a clearly defined problem. This problem Professor Wundt has sought to solve. The question he puts to himself is, "Wherein consists the unity of consciousness, wherein is the totality of all mental life, individual and collective?" It will thus be seen that he and his school are leaving no difficulty untouched, and if the results of their studies are not universally accepted as satisfactory it will not be from any lack of thoroughness on the part of those who have made them.

Objectively, the study of mind psychophysically may be made a basis for the study of language. Or from the study of language one may form some opinion as to the nature and origin of mind. The problems of language are many and difficult of solution. How did language originate? How has it been developed? What does its use indicate? Broca in 1861 located the organ of speech in the center of the brain and by his writings laid the foundation of the science of phonetics, but was unable to overcome the well-nigh universal conviction that we can not account for the beginning of speech or of its development upon a merely mechanical and material basis. Speech implies thought, and thought has not been proved to be an attribute of matter or a product of mechanics. Wundt has not failed to study the problem of mental life objectively as well as introspectively. He has created the science of psychophysics. He has originated the theory of the parallelism of physical and psychophysical phenomena. As easily the first in this department of study, it is to his laboratory and to the men he has trained that students who are awaiting the solution of the difficulties connected with the psychophysical problem are turning for light. Wundt uses the word epiphenomena, which may be discontinuous, even if life itself is continuous, to explain various mental manifestations. But even here in the effort to explain centralization