Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING AND SOCIAL WORK-MEYER 193

Science, as we understand it today, is a specific method of dealing with facts. It
is systematized common sense, but of a type demanding, first, exact observation and
experimental control of facts, and, second, methodical formulation of the facts and the
principles or laws. Science stands opposed to uncritical knowledge, such as knowledge
by intuition and fancy, if such knowledge at all deserves the commonly accepted implication of what is meant by knowledge. Fancy, assumption, hypothesis, belief, and
more or less crude, actual experience-these are the raw materials out of which science
arises as soon as we put the emphasis on objective validity and trial by all the rules of
experimentation and not only the rules of reasoning. Science is man's way of bringing
order into his own vision of the facts, and his vision of the facts is laid down in his language and formulations in words and number signs, but above all in the practical
command of the facts themselves, as shown in experimentation.
For a long time, repeating in a way the manner in which the human mind with its
tendency toward universals and noumena dealt with nature and facts generally, the
scientific study of mentality kept in unduly abstract spheres, as if we had to confine
our study to the aspect of man, to which eternity is ascribed. And then to counteract
this tendency with another extreme, the conscientious scientist arose with the attempt
to explain mind out of the brain and the glands of man, as if mind were a product of
the individual alone and not a development of habits largely molded also in social
contacts. Both of these tendencies are metaphysical and destined to yield ultimately
to a method of objective science, which takes the facts as it finds them and studies
them for their differential characteristics, the conditions under which they arise, the
way they work, their effects, and the means of modifying them.
With the application of the scientific method to the study of mentality there first
came a phase during which psychology tried to establish itself through an elaborate
use of quantitative methods, limiting psychology, as the science was and is called, to
a science purely of the data of consciousness. In this it rid itself first of the soul concept and kept itself in virtuous aloofness from the concepts of causality that govern
the natural sciences, and even from genetics. It became an essentially descriptive
science, made particularly limited through the paralyzing and devitalizing formula of
psycho-physical parallelism. In the hands of a few it rid itself further of the mind
concept and finally even of that of consciousness, and turned to a strict behaviorism,
and within this frame of transformations we have had by contractions and re-expansions a number of editions of so-called "new psychology," of which we want to outline
the outstanding trends.
If there is any one trait common to man, it is his individuality, inequality, and
remarkable variation and variability. The practical realization of such differences
must be as old as man's appreciation of man. They naturally suggested a quantitative
approach. In a way, the scientific understanding of these differences of personal
equipment received a first pragmatic contact with rigorous science only as late as
I795, when Maskelyne dismissed Kinnebrook, an observer at the Greenwich Observatory, because of the excessive personal variation in his reaction-time.
With Fechner and with Wundt, when he initiated laboratory work in psychology
in i878, efforts to establish quantitative methods were uppermost, and Hipp's chronoscope lent especially great scientific dignity to psychological science with the rise of
researches on reaction-time. Accuracy of time-measurements for a long period dazzled
the would-be psychologist. Weber's law of the relations of stimuli and the just per