IT IS ALMOST LITERALLY TRUE that no two man of dis-
tinction have been agreed concerning the problems, the meth-
ods, the subject matter, or the personal and social worth of
what might otherwise be the science of psychology. This is a curi-
ous and distressing circumstance, for the laboratory study of some
of the events that should properly be called mental is well over
three generations old,--as measured by the productive lives of the
experimenters,--and several thousand years old,--as measured by
a practical knowledge of the allowances that must be made for the
nature of human nature. But in spite of the attention given to it, a
science of human nature is yet to be achieved.

Men say that psychology is facing in the right direction, and
that it is not facing in the right direction; that its methods are
adequate to its subject matter, and that its methods are not ade-
quate to its subject matter; that its subject matter should be states
of consciousness, the intrinsic powers of a mind, the course and
organization of mental processes, the conditions of experience, or
the unique functions of an intact organism, and that its subject
matter should be reflexes, responses to stimuli, reactions, behavioral
acts, or dynamically organized modes of adjustment; that its pro-
cedure should be agenetic, analytical, and molecular; that its
procedure should be configural, functional, and molar; that it should
be affiliated with biology or is, indeed, a branch of biological sci-
ence; that it should not be affiliated with biology, because its
nearest relatives are the novel, the biography, the humanities, and
the normative disciplines; that it should be strictly positive, having
no traffic with philosophy and eschewing all values; that its natural
habitat is among the systems of moral, social, and religious philoso-
phy; that it should treat of the composition and structure of a
unique phenomenal order known as direct experience, and which
is equal to the whole of reality; that it should treat of acts, powers,
faculties, or functions exercised in connection either with phe-
nomenal reality or with physical reality; that it should begin its
work with abnormal types of adjustment, or with primitive drives
and urges, and the lusts of small children, or with the behavior of
the lower animals; that its obvious point of departure is intro-
spective evidence furnished by the average, mature, and normal

-vii-