PSYCHOLOGY, NATURAL SCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY.[1]
ORIGINALLY, before the division of labor, the kingdom of knowledge formed an undivided whole, and philosophy was monarch of all she surveyed. In the course of time different fields of study were marked off, but the unity of the whole was not lost sight of. Philosophy remained the mother science for more than two thousand years, and the special sciences that sprang up came within the sphere of her influence. The Greek and mediæval philosophers knew all that was known in the theoretical domain, and even a Christian Wolff felt competent to lecture on physics, mathematics, and political science in addition to psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics; while Kant was willing to accept almost any chair in the faculty of philosophy except the professorship of poetry, which, all will agree, he very wisely declined.
But in our day all that has changed. The labor has been divided and subdivided until at present the individual worker hardly dares to claim a knowledge of anything but the narrowest strip in the field of truth, and the college professor, who was formerly a jack of all trades, now modestly confesses that he is master of none. The world has been chopped into little bits and each investigator must see to it that he leaves his fragment of reality smaller than he found it. Philosophy, the sometime queen, has become a dowager; her children have deserted her, all but a few barren daughters, we are often told, for whom nobody cares. The only members of the original household left are psychology, logic, æsthetics, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, a paltry remnant of a once brilliant and numerous crew.
And now the demand is frequently heard that psychology too
cut loose from her old-fashioned sisters, and set up an establishment of her own or go to live with the natural sciences. The
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- ↑ Read before the American Philosophical Association, at the Cambridge Meeting, Dec. 27, 1905.
