What is thus said of a special group of inquiries by one of the foremost
of the younger psychologists, is not without its bearings on all the
departments in which psychology can learn. For physiological, or what is
technically called psychological, experiment, is co-ordinate with many
other sources of information. Much, for instance, is to be learnt by a
careful study of language by those who combine sound linguistic knowledge
with psychological training. It is in language, spoken and written, that
we find at once the great instrument and the great document of the
distinctively human progress from a mere _Psyche_ to a mature _Nous_, from
Soul to Mind. Whether we look at the varieties of its structure under
different ethnological influences, or at the stages of its growth in a
nation and an individual, we get light from language on the
differentiation and consolidation of ideas. But here again it is easy to
lose oneself in the world of etymology, or to be carried away into the
enticing questions of real and ideal philology.
“The human being of the psychologist,” says Herbart(45), “is the social
and civilised human being who stands on the apex of the whole history
through which his race has passed. In him is found visibly together all
the multiplicity of elements, which, under the name of mental faculties,
are regarded as a universal inheritance of humanity. Whether they are
originally in conjunction, whether they are originally a multiplicity, is
a point on which the facts are silent. The savage and the new-born child
give us far less occasion to admire the range of their mind than do the
nobler animals. But the psychologists get out of this difficulty by the
unwarranted assumption that all the higher mental activities exist
potentially in children and savages—though not in the animals—as a
rudimentary predisposition or psychical endowment. Of such a nascent
intellect, a nascent reason, and nascent moral sense, they find
recognisable traces in the scanty similarities which the behaviour of
child or savage offers to those of civilised man. We cannot fail to note
that in their descriptions they have before them a special state of man,
and one which, far from accurately defined, merely follows the general
impression made upon us by those beings we name civilised. An extremely
fluctuating character inevitably marks this total impression. For there
are no general facts:—the genuine psychological documents lie in the
momentary states of individuals: and there is an immeasurably long way
from these to the height of the universal concept of man in general.”