The Science of Human Nature: A Psychology for Beginners — John Shaqi
The Science of Human Nature: A Psychology for BeginnersPyle, William Henry
Science
The Science of Human Nature: A Psychology for Beginners
Pyle, William Henry
Educational psychology; Psychology
A scientist is one who has learned to organize his knowledge. The main
difference between a scientist and one who is not a scientist is that
the scientist sees the significance of facts, while the non-scientific
man sees facts as more or less unrelated things. As one comes to hunt
for causes and inquire into the significance of things, one becomes a
scientist. A thing or an event always points beyond itself to something
else. This something else is what goes before it or comes after it,--is
its cause or its effect. This causal relationship that exists between
events enables a scientist to prophesy. By carefully determining what
always precedes a certain event, a certain type of happening, a
scientist is able to predict the event. All that is necessary to be able
to predict an event is to have a clear knowledge of its true causes.
Whenever, beyond any doubt, these causes are found to be present, the
scientist knows the event will follow. Of course, all that he really
_knows_ is that such results have always followed similar causes in the
past. But he has come to have faith in the uniformity and regularity of
nature. The chemist does not find sulphur, or oxygen, or any other
element acting one way one day under a certain set of conditions, and
acting another way the next day under exactly the same conditions. Nor
does the physicist find the laws of mechanics holding good one day and
not the next.
The scientist, therefore, in his thinking brings order out of chaos in
the world. If we do not know the causes and relations of things and
events, the world seems a very mixed-up, chaotic place, where anything
and everything is happening. But as we come to know causes and
relations, the world turns out to be a very orderly and systematic
place. It is a lawful world; it is not a world of chance. Everything is
related to everything else.
Now, the non-scientific mind sees things as more or less unrelated. The
far-reaching causal relations are only imperfectly seen by it, while
the scientific mind not only sees things, but inquires into their causes
and effects or consequences. The non-scientific man, walking over the
top of a mountain and noticing a stone there, is likely to see in it
only a stone and think nothing of how it came to be there; but the
scientific man sees quite an interesting bit of history in the stone. He
reads in the stone that millions of years ago the place where the rock
now lies was under the sea. Many marine animals left their remains in
the mud underneath the sea. The mud was afterward converted into rock.
Later, the shrinking and warping earth-crust lifted the rock far above
the level of the sea, and it may now be found at the top of the
mountain. The one bit of rock tells its story to one who inquires into
its causes. The scientific man, then, sees more significance, more
meaning, in things and events than does the non-scientific man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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