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T SOUNDS a little amusing to hear some belated pessimist talk of "this materialistic age." An age is materialistic whose interest centers in material things. But any one who is at all alert knows that the interest of the present age is precisely not in material things but in something far more important, far more precarious. Things, after all, are comparatively harmless, compliant affairs. We can do pretty much what we please with them. They neither answer back nor stir up trouble. What really gives us concern is people. Men and women, we discover, are the stuff out of which most of life is made. If they are politicians, they have the fate of millions in their hands. If they are parents, they can make or wreck the lives of their offspring. If they are teachers, they can twist and darken the souls of their young charges, or can build them straight and luminous. If we marry them we soon discover they can make heaven or hell. Things, of themselves, are singularly impotent. It is men and women that mostly

count.

We are learning that at last. If you go into any fair-sized bookshop in Europe or America, you see that the books which to-day stand out most are those about people.

I do not mean biographies of the oldfashioned sort, which give dates and lineages and recite complimentary anecdotes. It is a different kind of book about people that is capturing attention to-day. It is books about ourselves our child and grown-up selves; our normal and sick selves; ourselves in inner or outer conflict; ourselves in our illogicalities, confusions, and self-delusions; ourselves as individuals and as crowds; as workers, employers, citizens, and patriots; ourselves as demanding human beings.

The spirit of the age, in short, has turned psychological. There is need enough for this, Heaven knows. The historic follies committed in the name of reason have been sufficient to put us all to the blush. Not only man's inhumanity to man, but man's naïve ignorance about most of his human relationships, gives ground for the conviction that if we are to get on a bit more successfully, we must handle ourselves at least as effectively as we now handle automobiles and seven-tubed radios.

Human beings have psychologized about themselves, of course, throughout the ages. They have wrestled with their sinful souls and meditated upon the workings of their minds. There have even been commanding

figures, like Socrates, who have bidden every one to know himself. There have been men of psychological insight such as Confucius and Lao-tsze, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, Jacob Böhme, Swedenborg, who have turned their penetrating gaze upon the human mysteries. Psychology is not something utterly new. It is as old as man's interest in himself. And yet there is one sense in which it is new. It is new as a science. In fact, it is the youngest of the sciences, born only a little more than fifty years ago. Even to-day, as time goes in the sciences, psychology is but an infant stretching its hands to the moon.

There is something curious about that. One would suppose that the sciences would have begun first with man himself; for certainly man is nearest and most accessible to himself. And yet, throughout all the preceding centuries, man has built up sciences about pretty nearly everything else in the world except himself. He began with the farthest away, the stars. It is only in our own day that he has come at last to what is nearest at hand, his own personality.

Great things may come of this belated turning to himself. Man shaped and handled tools for thousands of years, without making much change in the order of his life. Then, in the great days of Galileo and Newton, the science of tools-mechanics-was born; and in a little over three hundred years the human world has been changed more profoundly than in all the accumulated millions of years preceding. Bring a science to birth, and something is bound to happen. As a matter of fact, some

thing has already happened from the birth of even so young a science as psychology. Most important of all is a new point of view that is beginning to shape itself in the world.

It is in evidence, for example, in the region of child life. Education is being literally made over. The parent-child relation is being transformed into something far more wholesome. The backward child is being given an opportunity hitherto denied. The juvenile delinquent is being saved from the social discard.

Medicine is being affected. Physicians are becoming alive to the fact that they are dealing with human beings who have minds, emotions, and interests which powerfully affect the course of blood-streams, the action of heart, liver, adrenals, and the rest. A physician who is not also an alert psychologist will soon be passé. Industrial life is being affected. The squareness of the square peg is being discovered in time to prevent misplacement into the round hole. Workers are being studied as human beings. Foremen are taught the "handling" of their men. Executives plan improved human relations in factory and shop. Again, our understanding of social and political life is being affected. We are learning about the crowd and about crowd-mindedness. Flags, now know, are not simply flags, but powerful instruments of crowd suggestion. Boundaries are not simply boundaries, but powerful shapers and misshapers of our point of view. We know now that people, in the mass, do not make decisions, but that they are beaten upon by thousandfold suggestions which drive

we

them unconsciously in directions which may be tragic. What we now discover, in short, is that man is not, in the main, a rational animal; rather, he is an animal driven by impulse and crowd-suggestion. All this has deepened and clarified our understanding of social and political life. While it has plucked the human being down from his pedestal of supposedly God-given rationality, it has at least shown him what he must do if he is ever to raise himself above the helplessness of his social and political self-deceptions.

All these things and more have happened already. What will happen in a hundred or in two hundred years is impossible to predict. But when we realize that hitherto there was no science of psychology, only a few scattered insights and a deal of vague theorizing, the future holds rather fascinating promise. Is it too much to expect that when man has perfected his understanding of his own self to the same degree that he has perfected his understanding of atoms and ultra-violet rays, changes in the conduct of human life will occur of which we can now have not even the slightest notion?

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And now for the birth of this science. A science is born when techniques are devised which permit of accuracy and objectivity. Hence the epoch-making date 1879; for in that year William Wundt established in Leipsic the first psychological laboratory. That was the beginning of the end of the metaphysical psychologist, the theological psychologist, the psychologist of the arm-chair and of the pleasant literary ramble. It was the beginning of

rigorous patience-taxing work. It will be of interest to Americans to recall that two of Wundt's early pupils were James McKeen Cattell and G. Stanley Hall. Both of these young men, returning to important academic posts, established psychological laboratories in America. That was in 1883. Two laboratories! In the present year a laboratory is to be found in nearly every college or university that boasts a department of psychology. The effect of these two laboratories was to start a movement of experimental research that has since made America fairly noted throughout the world.

Thus the American impulse came chiefly from Germany. This is of considerable significance, as we shall presently see, for the German approach to psychology was sufficiently different from the French, Austrian, and Italian to develop a widely different set of interests and techniques. Wundt's endeavor was to make a minute and accurate study of the psychological mechanisms and processes found in the so-called normal individual. Thus he was interested in vision, hearing, smell, taste the senses generally; in memory, judgment, reasoning, learning. The Wundtian tradition has continued in America and has built up what we may refer to as the "academic" type of psychology.

The French development was different. Beginning in 1888, with the appointment of M. Ribot to the newly established chair of experimental and comparative psychology in the Collège de France and continuing with men such as Janet, Richet, Grasset, Paulhan, and others, French psychology early addressed itself to

the problem of the mental life as a whole. It was not so much interested in the study of the particular mechanisms as in the way the whole personality reacted within its environment. This led early to the study of abnormalities of personality -hysteria, hypnotic suggestibility, hallucination, dissociated personpersonality, and so on. It was a fairly long time before such problems began to be investigated in America. Even to-day they still remain outside the sphere of academic psychology proper.

The Italian beginnings were of a rather special kind. In 1876, Lombroso published his first work on the psychology of crime. That book made a great impression throughout the world. The work was continued by Sergi, who was profoundly convinced that science ought to be used to prevent as well as to understand the development of criminals. He therefore studied the child for the purpose of learning how to train not only the intellect but the entire personality. The Montessori method was one of the most noted results of these early beginnings in child study.

And now Austria. In the eighties of the past century, a young Viennese physician, Dr. Sigmund Freud, was studying with Charcot in Paris. He was keenly interested in the use made of hypnosis to cure nervous diseases. Those were the days when it was medical blasphemy to assert that any disease could be cured by psychological means. All diseases were assumed to be bodily in origin and subject only to bodily treatment. But apparently Charcot was disproving that sacred dogma of the

doctors, with the result that they and the lay world poured withering scorn upon him. Freud, returning to Vienna, found that his friend, Dr. Breuer, had hit upon much the same hypnotic method of treatment. That was the beginning of new things. Freud continued his researches, returning to France to study with Bernheim; and before long, abandoning hypnosis, but holding to the view of the influence of the subconscious, he developed the now famous method of psychoanalysis.

The clinical nature of Freud's work must be emphasized, for it led to the second stage in the development of the science of psychology, namely, the curative. Psychology began now not simply to watch processes, to measure and classify them. It tried to set curative processes going in the individual. Freud, like Charcot, has been furiously criticized and most scathingly condemned. It is no part of the function of this paper to enter into an appraisement of the bitter controversy which still rages. It is enough to say that, whatever the elements of truth or falsity in the Freudian point of view, something of profound moment has emerged from the early clinical insights of the young Viennese physician.

One more date, and we shall bring ourselves to the present century. In 1890, William James published his "Principles of Psychology." The book was an instant success. It made James famous almost overnight. It has continued to be one of the great landmarks of psychological science. It gave to American psychology its definitive direction; and it has supplied American psycholo

gists with most of their problems for research. James's views on habits, instincts, emotions, and the stream of consciousness, despite their imperfections, will continue to remain of outstanding value in the history of psychological development. Also James himself will always be, for American psychologists, one of the most attractive and stimulating of personalities.

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And now, having noted these fivefold beginnings, we come to the period of the last twenty-five years. It is a bewildering task to try to trace in adequate detail the developments which have taken place in that short period; for the young science, belying all respectable precedents for infant life, no sooner was born than it bounced out of its cradle and began to run and leap. It has leaped ahead in at least a score of directions. Sometimes, of course, it has walked, and with cautious step; for not all of its adventures into the terra incognita of human nature have been unattended with danger. Sometimes, also, it has had to retrace its steps. Sometimes-so its skeptical friends have said-it has succeeded in getting itself rather helplessly lost. It has, however, had a surprisingly good time of it all.

One of its most fascinating explorations has been made-William James started it—into the region of our original or unalloyed human or unalloyed human nature. What psychological impulses are we born with, impulses that drive us from the day of our birth to the day of our death? James called them instincts and gave a long list of them. Thorndike also, after ingenious and painstaking ex

periments with animals and infants, gave an impressive list in his "Original Nature of Man." To subsequent psychologists the lists seemed too long and also too rigid. Much was included that seemed the result of environment and training. William McDougall gave a shorter list that attracted wide attention. But psychologists attacked even the shorter list. Watson, Dunlap, Kantor, Bernard, Kuo, Faris, carried on a merry fight which continues to this day.

The upshot of the fight thus far is that much has been rescued for environment and training. The prevailing tendency now is to regard the human being not as born with an elaborate equipment of special powers, each of which clicks into action as at the pressing of a button, but as born with more or less general tendencies to respond. It becomes even a little out of fashion to talk of "instincts"—such as the much used and abused instinct of pugnacity, or gregariousness, or motherhood. Instincts seem too suspiciously like ready-made gods out of a machine. The result is that the human being is regarded as very largely susceptible to the modifying influences of environment and education.

Another fascinating exploration has been made into the region of habit formation. A term which is much used among psychologists is "conditioned reflex.' "conditioned reflex." There is no space in a brief paper to attempt an explanation of this rather cryptic term. It is enough to say that it harks back to the famous Russian psychologist Pavlov, and that it has cast revealing light upon the manner in which our habits are formed and