Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/60

IV. THE NEED OF A SOCIETY FOE EXPEKI- MENTAL PSYCHOLOGY. 1 By JOSEPH JACOBS. THIS is the age of Societies. Agriculture and ballooning, cart-horses and dentistry, engineering and forestry, all subjects from A to Z, are represented by associations in- tended to promote the interests of each particular subject. Psychology alone has no society connecting together the workers in the wide field which the science of mind can claim for itself. Yet neither work nor workers are wanting. The science itself has reached what we may term the mono- graphic stage. Methods of investigation are sufficiently advanced to allow of the work being allotted to specialists in the various branches of the study. Much too is being done for psychology by workers in other sciences. A quarter of physiology all that part which deals with nerves and much that deals with muscles is as much psychology as physi- ology. Most of the experience gained by mad-doctors is so much material gained for mental science. Social statistics have their lessons for the psychologist. Much of anthro- pology and almost all folk-lore, almost all sociology and all that the Germans mean by Volkerpsy dialogic what are these but data of the science of mind ? So too philology in as far as it deals with meanings, not roots has rich instruction in store for the psychological investigator. And all these studies might hope for reciprocal aid from psychology, which may one day assist biology in determining what constitutes the unity of the organism. But all this awaits the progress of the study of the individual mind ; and it is the need of a society to develop this study by collective investigation that I wish to point out. Such a society would fulfil the ordinary functions of similar institutions by affording a locale where fellow-students might get to know each other and each other's work. It could collect at its rooms a specialist library ; it could pro- vide instruments needed in psychometry and now only accessible to persons with long purses or mechanical ingen- uity. It could publish memoirs, Jahresberichte of progress in the various branches of the science, and supply a much felt 1 A Paper read before the Aberdeen Meeting of the British Association. 4