The authors are entirely in the right; their readers are physicians and engineers, and not physiologists and physicists; their subject-matter is held together and unified by a practical aim, and not by an initial point of view; it is unfair to judge them by the standards of science. A textbook of physics or of physiology, on the other hand, is—as we have seen—a transcription of the world of experience from a particular standpoint, which is deliberately adopted at the outset and deliberately maintained to the end; no item of experience that is not visible from this standpoint can properly get into it; and it is unfair to judge it by the needs and aims of a technology. All human activities have their limitations: and if the technologist is less clearly conscious of the restriction laid upon him by his practical end, and the man of science feels more keenly the narrowing of his universe by the scientific point of view,—the rule is certainly not without exceptions; but we may grant the tendency,—that is due partly to the greater outward diversity of the technological career, and partly to the more rigorous training in logic that scientific investigation affords and demands. The technologist never, to be sure, handles experience in its totality, but he deals with individual cases, and so comes nearer to the concrete than his scientific colleague; and he may, moreover, change from the practical to the scientific or the appreciative attitude without any great fear of leaving his last; his interests are thus diversified. The man of science, constantly applying the principles of logic, and constantly on his guard against the encroachment of logical theory upon the facts of observation, is forced to be self-critical, and so comes nearer to a true perspective.[1]
- ↑ A good illustration of what is here meant is furnished by the current use of the word "dynamic," to which attention has been called in the introduction. Occasionally, "dynamic" as opposed to "static" seems to mean simply temporal as opposed to spatial, or to imply a longitudinal section of experience as opposed to a cross-section. Ordinarily, however, as the term is used in psychiatry and "applied psychology," it seems to go back to an exploded theory of causation, or even behind causation to animism; it seems to imply a driving power, or motive force, or an interplay of effective powers and forces, such as is wholly unfamiliar to modern science. It has become, so far as the writer can make out, a sort of watchword, expressive of emotion rather than of thought; at any rate, he knows of no attempt to define it. Again, one of our leading psychiatrists warns the "professional psychologist. . . [to] come to the hospital clinic. He must imitate the geologist and leave his academic shades and seek his material for study where it is to be found. It is in pathologic conditions of the mind that he will find his true field of research." All honor to the clinic!—but has then the crust of our earth gone moldy, and are all geological formations diseased?
physical and social anthropology and ethnology, from statistics, from general biology, zoology, botany, thremmatology, from psychology and psychophysics, from ethics, economics, sociology,—then he is the more apt to realize from howmany and how various sources his own discipline is sprung.
