Page:The American journal of psychology (IA americanjournalo07austuoft).pdf/14

6 is such a thing as over-production of statistical tabulation on the one hand, and a use of exact apparatus in a way so lacking in rigor and severity as to positively embolden the speculative propensities so inveterate in this field, while in this country much of the psychology of the last decade is by "armchair professors," who lack patience for the tedious details of laboratory research as well as the instinct for concentration and specialization that can focus their efforts upon anything jess than the entire field of psychology. This desires to represent neither of these tendencies, nor the disposition, now also too rife in this period of rapid transition, to press imperfectly established observation into the service of old discussions concerning problems not yet soluble by science, such as epistemology, the nature of consciousness, the freedom and essence of the will, the ego, immortality, etc., or idealism generally, on the one hand; or molecular tremors, phosphorescence, memory cells, chemical and electrical tropes by those who are neither chemists nor electricians; etc., or materialism generally, on the other hand.

Studies in abnormal psychology, including the insane, criminals, idiotic, blind, deaf, or other defectives or degenerates. Here belong a large number of border-land phenomena not yet adequately represented in medical literature. Here premature conclusions, like the existence of a magnetic fluid, telepathy, spiritism, dream signs and prophecies, etc., whieh represent the largest number of articles thought by their authors to be psychological, but which the has had to decline, not purely because the bottom facts recorded were not of great interest and importance, but because the observation was utterly uncritical and distorted by crude superstition or crass theory on the one hand, and the Lombroso-Nordau tendency to find symptoms of disease or decadence in every exceptional trait or act, forgetting that the rough symptom groups found practical for the clinic are not the categories by which to diagnose the forces that make for higher human evolution and variation, on the other;—all this, from the standpoint of the, is far less scientific