Even the prison and the penitentiary have made their contributions.
If there be any need of generalizing the foregoing, we may say that the development of the New Psychology has been due to the growth, on the one hand, of the science of physiology, giving us the method of experiment, and, on the other, of the sciences of humanity in general, giving us the method of objective observation, both of which indefinitely supplement and correct the old method of subjective introspection.
So much for the occasioning causes and method of the New Psychology. Are its results asked for? It will be gathered, from what has already been said, that its results cannot be put down in black and white like those of a mathematical theory. It is a movement, no system. But as a movement it has certain general features.
The chief characteristic distinguishing it from the old psychology is undoubtedly the rejection of a formal logic as its model and test. The old psychologists almost without exception held to a nominalistic logic. This of itself were a matter of no great importance, were it not for the inevitable tendency and attempt to make living concrete facts of experience square with the supposed norms of an abstract, lifeless thought, and to interpret them in accordance with its formal conceptions. This tendency has nowhere been stronger than in those who proclaimed that "experience" was the sole source of all knowledge. They emasculated experience till their logical conceptions could deal with it; they sheared it down till it would fit their logical boxes; they pruned it till it presented a trimmed tameness which would shock none of their laws; they preyed upon its vitality till it would go into the coffin of their abstractions. And neither so-called "school" was free from this tendency. The two legacies of fundamental principles which Hume left, were: that every distinct idea is a separate existence, and that every idea must be definitely determined in quantity and quality. By the first he destroyed all relation but accident; by the second he denied all universality. But these principles are framed after purely logical models; they are rather the abstract logical principles of difference and identity, of A is A and A is not B, put in the guise of a psychological expression. And the logic of concrete experience, of growth and development, repudiates such abstractions. The logic of life transcends the logic of nominalistic thought. The reaction against Hume fell back on certain ultimate, indecomposable, necessary first truths immediately known through some mysterious simple faculty of the mind. Here again the logical model manifests itself. Such intuitions are not psychological; they are conceptions bodily imported from the logical sphere. Their origin, tests, and character are all logical. But the New Psychology would not have necessary truths about principles; it would have the touch of reality in the life of the soul. It rejects the formalistic intuitionalism for one which has been well termed dynamic. It believes that truth, that reality, not necessary beliefs about reality, is given in the living experience of the soul's development.
Experience is realistic, not abstract. Psychical life is the fullest, deepest, and richest manifestation of this experience. The New Psychology is content to get its logic from this experience, and not do violence to the sanctity and integrity of the latter by forcing it to conform to certain preconceived abstract ideas. It wants the logic of fact, of process, of life. It has within its departments of knowledge no psycho- statics , for it can nowhere find spiritual life at rest. For this reason, it abandons all legal fiction of logical and mathematical analogies and rules; and is willing to throw itself upon experience, believing that the mother which has borne it will not betray it. But it makes no attempts to dictate to this experience, and tell it what it must be in order to square with a scholastic logic. Thus the New Psychology bears the realistic stamp of contact with life.
From this general characteristic result most of its features. It has already been noticed that it insists upon the unity and solidarity of psychical life against abstract theories which would break it up into atomic elements or independent powers. It lays large stress upon the will; not as an abstract power of unmotivated choice, nor as an executive power to obey the behests of the understanding, the legislative branch of the psychical government, but as a living bond connecting and conditioning all mental activity. It emphasizes the teleological element, not in any mechanical or external sense, but regarding life as an organism in which immanent ideas or purposes are realizing themselves through the development of experience. Thus modern psychology is intensely ethical in its tendencies. As it refuses to hypostatize abstractions into self-subsistent individuals, and as it insists upon the automatic spontaneous elements in man's life, it is making possible for the first time an adequate psychology of man's religious nature and experience. As it goes into the depths of man's nature it finds, as stone of its foundation, blood of its life, the instinctive tendencies of devotion, sacrifice, faith, and idealism which are the eternal substructure of all the struggles of the nations upon the altar stairs which slope up to God. It finds no insuperable problems in the relations of faith and reason, for it can discover in its investigations no reason which is not based upon faith, and no faith which is not rational in its origin and tendency. But to attempt to give any detailed account of these features of the New Psychology would be to go over much of the recent discussions of ethics and theology. We can conclude only by saying that, following the logic of life, it attempts to comprehend life.
How We Think
Part One: The Problem of Training Thought
Chapter Two. The Need for Training Thought
Chapter Three. Natural Resources in the Training of Thought
Chapter Four. School Conditions and the Training of Thought
Chapter Five. The Means and End of Mental Training: The Psychological and the Logical
Part Two: Logical Considerations
Chapter Six. The Analysis of a Complete Act of Thought
Chapter Seven. Systematic Inference: Induction and Deduction
Chapter Eight. Judgment: The Interpretation of Facts
Chapter Nine. Meaning: Or Conceptions and Understanding
Chapter Ten. Concrete and Abstract Thinking
Chapter Eleven. Empirical and Scientific Thinking
