Let us now, from Hawthorne to James Branch Cabell and others, begin our journey through the field of American fiction. CHAPTER II _How Nathaniel Hawthorne Exorcised Hester Prynne_ For twenty-five years America has been the classic country of experimental psychology. The more vague and uncertain metaphysics and ethics became in America, the more rigorous, exact and precise became psychology. The Americans carried to the field of experimental psychology their taste for statistics, formulæ and graphs. They set about with a singular complacency, measuring and weighing with the dynameter that human mind which their idealism had pictured, up to that time, as so transcendental and intangible. Never was science carried farther. Never was the thinking being submitted to such a test, gauged, measured, weighed, counted. The results of experimental psychology have passed into everyday practices. The psychological test and the intelligence test are a part of the university program, and count towards admission into the professions, the civil service and the army. The American universities which are substituting psychological tests for entrance examinations are becoming more and more numerous. This development of experimental psychology in America is interesting. It explains the obsession which the psychological problem has acquired in the eyes of contemporary novelists. In America, as in Europe, the novel has abandoned ethics for psychology. One could not form a just idea of the American novel of to-day without bearing in mind at least the principal lines of the development of experimental psychology in America since William James. * * * * *