McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 5, October 1893Various
General
McClure's Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 5, October 1893
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
The laboratory workshop is provided with the common implements and
facilities required for working in wood, glass, and metal. Both for
original research and for demonstration, this laboratory is the most
unique, the richest, and the most complete in any country; and in
witness of the fame and genius of its present director, and of the
rapidly spreading interest in experimental psychology, particularly
in America, there are already gathered here, under Professor
Muensterberg's administration, a larger number of students specially
devoted to mental science than ever previously studied together in
any one place.
THE FUTURE AND INFLUENCE OF THE NEW SCIENCE.
So much for the place and what is done there. Now, what is expected to
come from this new psychology? "Do you fellows expect to invent patent
ways of thinking?" was once asked me. Who can tell? Who, before
Galileo, would have prophesied that man should weigh the stars or know
their chemistry? Yet there is much ground for comparison between the
position of physical science then and that of mental science now. The
popular opinion of to-day is perhaps even less awake to the fact that
the world of mental phenomena is a world of laws, susceptible to
scientific experimentation, than was the day of Galileo to the similar
conception regarding physical phenomena. Have the physical sciences
changed aught for man since the sixteenth century? Then we must not
forget how slow was the growth, and how long it took to arrive at the
laws of gravity and of conservation, not to mention those of
evolution. Experimental psychology, as a systematic science, is almost
younger than its youngest students. The mental laws are as fixed and
as determinable as the laws of physics. Who then shall say what man
shall come to know of mental composition, of the great mental
universe, and of ourselves, its wandering planets, since minds _may_
be known as well as stars!
[Illustration: PROFESSOR WILHELM WUNDT, OF LEIPSIC, FOUNDER OF FIRST
PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY (1878).]
But psychology will not have to wait till its greater laws shall be
wholly established before she becomes of practical influence in common
affairs. He who reads most thoughtfully to-day will most appreciate
this truth. He who reads at all, reads of "individualism" as opposed
to "socialism." The Pope of Rome has declared that the "preoccupying"
problem for active Christianity must now be the industrial problem.
Every important treatise on the subject, appearing at present, admits
that the crucial question of the industrial problem is an ethical
problem, and every ethical treatise, that every ethical problem is a
psychological problem. Two years ago the Roman Catholic Church
established a psychological laboratory in its leading American
college.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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