Licence: In copyright
Credit: The mind of man : a text-book of psychology / by Gustav Spiller. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![stress on anything recollected unless it be something due to careful examination, and unless we have, by rule (sec. 136), exhausted all the relevant material to be found in the memory, the stores of which are useful for conduct, but not for eliciting truths. Such a method, I hold, is scientific, fruitful and well-based. Such a method, I claim, is the quintessence of the scientific method as applied in the physical sciences. Instruments and mathematical treatment may supplement it, but not displace it. These latter only give polish and precision to the great truths otherwise obtained. the student observe that the mere neglect of metaphysics or theology ivill not assist him in the discovery of truth.’] 2.—The Use of Hypotheses. In his Comparative Psychology, Lloyd Morgan tells the world that “ Psychologists make, or should make, 110 claim to any monopoly of know- ledge in the subject they study; their province is mainly to systematise that knowledge” (p. 44). Fortunately for us, this author’s practice is not in accord with his theory, for his conception of focal and marginal conscious- ness forms a valuable contribution to psychology. Nevertheless there is incalculable mischief in his assertion, however hedged round. What would be thought of a physicist or an astronomer who mainly systematised knowledge without seeing that it was gathered at first hand by competent specialists or by himself, or who gave a locus statidi to “ the plain man of shrewd insight ” ? The idea is monstrous. A psychology which mainly busied itself with systematising the conclusions of “ those who are not pro- fessed psychologists ” might as well relieve Sisyphus of his task. The one is as likely to be successful as the other. Underlying the statement I am criticising, there is an unpleasant truth. Unhappily, psychologists have been too anxious to systematise that which they had not previously examined. They leaned fatally to the opinion that truth could be sifted from popular notions as is sand by means of a sieve. The student must recognise once for all that if he is to be on the scientific plane he must make a claim on behalf of psychologists to a “monopoly of knowledge,” and that he must not attempt to systematise what has not been procured through the application of scientific methods. It has been the bane of psychologists that they have tacitly assumed that facts of consciousness do not require to be collected with the disciplined care which other sciences employ. I have advisedly said “tacitly” assumed, because few men have spoken out boldly as Lloyd Morgan does. The mischief has lain in unthinkingly proceeding along the wrong path, in giving elaborate explanations of popular fictions, and in not deliberately recognising that in psychology, as in physics, unbridled speculation is criminal waste. It is always dangerous to make unqualified statements. Instead of con- demning speculation outright, it would be perhaps better to pronounce sentence against it when its excursions are not rigorously limited. Few can object when “ speculation is but the play of the imagination along the fringe which borders our knowledge” (Lloyd Morgan, Comparative Psychology’, 1894, p. 323). But then we must insist upon a reasonable interpretation which shall not make the fringe equal to the robe to which it](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21938982_0030.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
