SOUL AND BODY
PSYCHOLOGY is, or should be, the corner-stone of the natural sciences and the' foundation of the spiritual sciences : the region it deals with is exactly in the juncture of body and soul. It is still a baby science—one might almost say a barbarian science. There has been a• tduch of demonology about it, a sulphurous air. unfit for ordinary breathing. But those por- tents, we shall hope, announce a marvellous coming-to-age'; they are promises not of wickedness but of greatness.
The relation it bears to the rest of knowledge can best be shown in the fact that the psychologist is concerned with the reallest and most concrete. of all things, actual personal con- sciousnesses. The biologist has sufficiently mobile subjects, and he tries to elucidate very notable and strange processes. His branch of science may be *called more real than that of the physicist. But the subjects of the psychologist are not only alive, not only elusive and hard to pin dOwn in the laboratory ; they have not only sensations and passions. They live in another dimension ; they have wills and t:plf-conscious pur- poses; they have arts and religions, and, more beautifully to the point, they invent or discover the very sciences themselves. And when we think•that the psychologist reduces to compre- hension, and the psychoanalyst works upon, the motive power for civilizations and cultures and understandings of the world; we may well be aghast that the baby should have such dyna- mite in its hands. Especially since they are only too apt to deny us the fantasy of the guardian angel! But by psychology we mean something very different from Professor Martin's psychology. He has obstinately been trying to instil into the members of the People's Institute; New York, the belief that the subject-matters of psychology and of chemistry are the same. Ile resolutely refuses to accept a place of any peculiar dignity for psychology. It might have been thought that, the members of a People's Institute were the last people on earth who should be provided with the purest and bitterest of mechanistic dogmas. There have been sad results of such teaching in Russia. But Professor Martin is incorrigible.. , He finds Herbert Spencer , far too lacalistic for his taste. He brings against Herr Freud the charge of being mystical. It is interesting to examine the cause of this accusation. Professor Martin starts with the desire to attach himself to a metaphysical system impervious to attack on the score of "admitting too much." The origin of behaviouristic and mechanistic theories is in the passion not to give anything away, not to proceed a step beyond the obvious. Armed with his system, Professor Martin, at best a laboratory psychologist, can pluck up courage to call Professor Freud unpractical. He calls him unpractical because it is exactly with the real problems of life and of consciousness that psychoanalysts are occupied. Of course, if his theory leads him to consider life and consciousness unwarrantable hypo- theses, he will find a scientist who deals with them unscientific.
But Professor Martin is very well versed in his own theories; he has, moreover, many valuable records of observation to bring forward when he is not too busy denouncing anyone who ever allowed a pinch of reality to the soul or assuring us that religion is an "escape mechanism." There is a kind of sturdy common sense in his casual opinions that makes the book good reading. He never denies himself the use of a word, for example, because he has previously denied meaning to the concept it represents. After several sections devoted to criticism of the concept of a "group mind," we find him talking of "crowd thinking" and of "the function of crowd ideas." Anyone who wishes to inform himself of the opinions of a typical physiological psychologist could hardly find a handier book to begin with.
In Almost Human Professor Robert Yerkes writes a popular and gossipy account of a colony of apes established by Seilora Rosalia Abreu in Cuba. This account is quite hopelessly un- scientific; it sets out to prove, one might almost say, that monkeys have souls three-quarters human by noting instances of maternal devotion, cupboard love, playfulness, displays of passion, initiative capacity and so forth. At times it would seem that Professor Yerkes is not very well acquainted with the habits of other animals ; for he tells an incident of a monkey licking over and, reviving her apparently stillborn child as though it might possibly be an unparalleled case of intelli- gence. The only part in which a decent rigour of experiment shines through is in the résumé of Professor Kochler's book, The Mentality of Apes, which was reviewed in the Spectator some months ago. As an example of Professor Yerkes' extreme looseness of thought we may mention his belief that the differences between man and man and between one race and another "are not more significant than those found in the anthropoid apes."
Nor can Dr. Louis Berman's The Glands Regulating Per- sonality be recommended to a clear-minded reader. The treatise is ambitious ; Dr. Berman sets out to describe the working of all the ductless glands of the body and to exhibit the characters and types which excess or deficiency of the different secretions accompanies. It is a pity that so im- portant a subject should be treated in so ill-digested a style.
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