Psyche's Lamp: A Revaluation of Psychological Principles as Foundation of All Thought (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Psyche's Lamp: A Revaluation of Psychological Principles as Foundation of All Thought

The fact is that psychology is not an organized science. Any department of inquiry becomes an organized science only under the unifying and Vitalizing influence of some principle of interpretation which touches its basic con ceptions and informs each isolated fact with a significance that knits it with all others into an organic whole. And, since primitively the human mind leaves no blanks in its scheme of things, any such basic interpretation can only be attained by violently displacing principles and conceptions previously accredited. Thus astronomy first became an organized science by the overthrow of the geocentric system and the enunciation of the Keplerian laws dynamics arose from the downfall of the Aristotelian dogma of motion and the formulation of the laws of Galilei; chemistry with Lavoisier's exposure of the. Doctrine of phlogistic substance and his explanation of oxydation. Biology came into being by the collapse of the dogma of creation; though, failing a consistent View of the mode of operation of evolution, it remains in the Copernican, and has not yet reached the Keplerian phase of development. Physiology and psychology have not yet become organized sciences at all. They are merely aggregates of disjointed theories and observations which, however valuable in themselves, afford no View of the general character of the phenomena which they investigate.

Is it mere coincidence that the natural sciences have developed in the order of the remoteness of their subject matter from the centre of human interest, and therefore of human prejudice, from man himself; first conquering the distant stars, then the physical world, then the world of organic life, and remaining at last held up by the problems of man himself, his organism, his soul? Is it the intrinsic difficulty of the task or the force of established prejudice which constitutes the increasing obstacle?

There have been controversies in abundance, but no revolutions in the realm of psychological science; no hieratic myth, no geocentric theory or doctrine of creation, has been finally relegated to limbo. Paralogisms such, to take but one instance, as the unity of the Ego,' which was reduced to tatters over a century ago by the critique of Kant, recur serenely as the left-moth) of official teaching in our great English universities in the present year of grace. Is it plausible to suppose that while in every other science progress has only been possible by the sweeping away of primitive conceptions, here alone, of all domains of knowledge, the human intellect has from the first seized the outlines of truth so infallibly that nofoccasion could arise to alter them? When we con sider the genesis of psychological science from theological ontology and scholastic epistemology, the academic seclusion in which she has long been nurtured, in close association with her confederate, the official Science of Virtue, it may be suspected that in even greater measure than in other fields of enquiry, the obstacles in her path are not merely the rocks and natural accidents of the ground, but walls and fences and artificial rockeries raised by pious hands. And it can cause us little surprise that the science of the soul has in general picked her steps amid those venerable impediments with beseeming caution and delicacy.

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