essences, of platonic ideas, of crystal battlements, of absolute
significance. But whether they be animists or associationists, a
supposition something like this is still the assumption of our usual
psychologists. It comes from their being for the most part philosophers,
in the technical sense, and from their showing the weakness of that
profession for logical abstractions. Myers was primarily a lover of life
and not of abstractions. He loved human life, human persons, and their
peculiarities. So he could easily admit the possibility of level beyond
level of perfectly concrete experience, all "queer and cactus-like"
though it might be, before we touch the absolute, or reach the eternal
essences.
Behind the minute anatomists and the physiologists, with their metallic
instruments, there have always stood the out-door naturalists with their
eyes and love of concrete nature. The former call the latter
superficial, but there is something wrong about your laboratory-biologist
who has no sympathy with living animals. In psychology there is a
similar distinction. Some psychologists are fascinated by the varieties
of mind in living action, others by the dissecting out, whether by
logical analysis or by brass instruments, of whatever elementary mental
processes may be there. Myers must decidedly be placed in the former
class, though his powerful use of analogy enabled him also to do work
after the fashion of the latter. He loved human nature as Cuvier and
Agassiz loved animal nature; in his view, as in their view, the subject
formed a vast living picture. Whether his name will have in psychology
as honorable a place as their names have gained in the sister science,
will depend on whether future inquirers shall adopt or reject his
theories; and the rapidity with which their decision shapes itself will
depend largely on the vigor with which this Society continues its labor
in his absence. It is at any rate a possibility, and I am disposed to
think it a probability, that Frederic Myers will always be remembered in
psychology as the pioneer who staked out a vast tract of mental
wilderness and planted the flag of genuine science upon it. He was an
enormous collector. He introduced for the first time comparison,
classification, and serial order into the peculiar kind of fact which he
collected. He was a genius at perceiving analogies; he was fertile in
hypotheses; and as far as conditions allowed it in this meteoric region,
he relied on verification. Such advantages are of no avail, however, if
one has struck into a false road from the outset. But should it turn out
that Frederic Myers has really hit the right road by his divining
instinct, it is certain that, like the names of others who have been
wise, his name will keep an honorable place in scientific history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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