Official proceedings of the annual meeting: 1923

I94

LAW AND GOVERNMENT

ceptible differences of sensation was of this quantitative order. We need not wonder
that in judging the result of these labors William James spoke of much of the scientific
psychology as a laborious demonstration of the obvious. The early efforts were largely
efforts to acquire a standing for psychology among the sciences by showing that it can
use quantitative methods.
Somehow, in order to work peacefully and unmolested, academic psychology
found it of advantage, if not logically necessary, to limit itself to strict introspection,
and even when the behavioristic wave came, it made a special point to keep its skirts
absolutely clear of the psychology not only of morality, ethics, and religion, but of all
the most truly dynamic interests of life. It limited itself to the pursuit of the study
of the sensations, neutral associations, and thought processes, and, finally, a venture
with the work-curve, the learning-curves, and the use of trial-and-error devices akin
to the puzzle box and maze of the animal experiments, and a certain amount of flirtation
with the natural history term "instinct."
There were, however, a few insurgents who wanted to include in the individuality
more vital human facts and distinctions, and, as the broadest and most courageous
among these, we find G. Stanley Hall, who urged his appeals in behalf of child study
and a frank attack on all kinds of human problems. He was, and is, an unhesitating
pragmatist temperamentally, if not theoretically. With him, the principle must have
been that nothing human should be foreign to the psychologist. Above all things he
was most devotedly interested in child study, and in a biological and genetic approach,
uncritical as it may have been with its bold exploitation of the recapitulation theory,
and a characteristic post-Darwinian method of piling up analogies as well as examples
in proof of his theses. It was again Stanley Hall's group that was ready to see a large
contribution to psychology in the tests of Binet and Simon, which came to replace the
overaccurate and formal psychometric studies of Cattell and others on college students
by sets of simple performances, viewed no longer from the angle of absolute quantity,
but from the much simpler and direct one of success or failure.
We do well to realize that the venture of Binet and Simon came only eighteen
years ago, no doubt intended frankly as a modest effort, born essentially of practical
exigencies-the call for a safer grading of Paris school children; hardly understood by
the originators as a move that might for a time command the central interest in psychology. The outstanding feature of this move is its confidence in the value of sampling a variously wide range of objective performances, and not merely testing and
measuring an abstract mind.
In the meantime, about I905, there had arisen the movement of medical social
work through Cabot in Boston, and in New York through a revolt against an attempt
to introduce old-fashioned after-care principles in psychiatry into the state system.
The "new psychology," which Scripture had extolled to us in the nineties (some
of you may have seen the book once present on many bookshelves), would hardly have
startled any social workers. But things proved different with respect to another wave
which had started in the eighties with occupation, hypnotism, work with multiple personalities, and hysteria, was further developed in the nineties, and came, in the first
decade of the present century, to take the more finished form of what we now know as
psycho-analysis, with its preoccupation with the unconscious, the emphasis on the sexinstinct, and, later, also on the ego-instincts. Seeing man in the light of mythology
and the fancy of the psychoneurotic, but at least in really human and vital terms