Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/182

178 to face, in the sense that other natural sciences have been. I am fully mindful of Professor Titchener's cogent apologia for the failure of the contemporary psychology to "hold its men," who tended either to leave it for more frankly speculative departments of thought, or sought the concreter fields of education, or physiology and therapeutics. But the fact seems to be that psychology has not been over-forward in seeking the test of concrete experience.

A somewhat definite program for the medical course in psychology has been discussed by Watson. It seems, not unnaturally, determined more by the place of the methods in experimental psychology than by direct consideration of their applications to the study of psychopathological conditions. From this standpoint, one might in minor detail suggest some modification of Professor Watson's plan; thus in any work on sight, campimetry should probably occupy an equal place with color vision. The skin and kinesthetic sensations have a psychopathological importance quite equal to that of hearing. Watson's plan is for a systematic experimental course; I must confess that what seem the most fitting topics do not coordinate themselves so readily in my mind, and my own tendency would be to make such a course less one in experimental psychology than in psychological experiments. The content of the laboratory course may indeed change with the progress of the science, in accordance with the principle that properly governs it; but as we are not trying to make psychologists, but medical men, we must subordinate the desideratum of the academic system to a series of those experiments and methods most likely to be made use of in actual medical practise. It is evident that in the determination of the proper subject matter of such a course, there enters not only the available stock-in-trade, so to speak, of experimental psychology, but also the consideration of those particular clinical exigencies in which they are likely to be of service. Only such experiments and methods should form a part of such a course for which definite value in special situations can be indicated; and the understanding of the application is on a level of importance equal with that of the experiment itself. The application of experimental methods will, of course, be practically confined to the study of individual cases, and the procedure which should be followed in the laboratory is thus an intensive study of each experimental method with individual subjects; group experimentation or methods which involve it are out of place in such a course. In an enumeration of the experimental methods which would seem, from the writer's particular experience, to best deserve place, would be included the study of the