James McKeen Cattell

“ What language was for the evolution of primitive man, measurement is for the advance of modern science. As a word selects similarities and ignores differences, so a measurement selects certain similarities from the concrete manifoldness of things. That such a great part of the world can be described in terms of a few units of measurement, and that this description should lead to such useful applications, is truly marvelous and admirable. ”

“ The concept of a science is an abstraction from an abstraction. The concrete fact is the individual experience of each of us. Certain parts of this experience are forcibly and artificially separated from the rest and become my science of psychology, your science of psychology, his science of psychology. From all these individual sciences, shifting not only from person to person but also from day to day, there arises by a kind of natural selection a quasi objective science of psychology. In a well-bred science, such as chemistry, the conventions have become standardized ”

“ If the astronomer goes to the ends of the earth and photographs a solar eclipse, making all sorts of measurements and calculations, we may say that this is an observation and not an experiment, but we have not made a useful definition; neither do we gain anything by deciding whether it is an experiment when a baby pulls apart a doll to see what is inside. The real distinction is between the casual experimenting and observing of daily life, and the planned and purposive experiment and observation of science. Science is experimental qua science. ”

“ The period of childhood and youth may be devoted to universal education, and equality of opportunity can be given to all. It is no longer needful to depend on a privileged class to conduct the affairs of government and to supply men of performance. Those selected from all the people as most fit can be given the preparation and opportunity needed to enable them to become leaders, and every one can take an intelligent share in political affairs and in appreciation of the higher things of life.
In giving us democracy science has made its greatest contribution to the limitation of warfare. ”

“ Science, democracy and the limitation of warfare are the great achievements of modern civilization. They have advanced together almost continuously from the beginnings of the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford in the twelfth century to their great triumphs in the nineteenth century and the present promise of their complete supremacy. It may be urged reasonably that science is the true cause of democracy and that science and democracy together are the influences most conducive to permanent and universal peace. ”

“ It is surely wasteful to select those uniformities that are true for all and to throw away those differences which are equally fit material for scientific treatment. Linnæus instructed his pupils to attend to species and to ignore varieties, and this in the end tended to make systematic botany and zoology unfruitful. If the zoologist had limited his work to the discovery of facts that are true for all animals and had ignored the differences between animals, he would have done something analogous to what the psychologist has actually done. ”

“ It would be entirely safe for the congress to decide what the nation shall do and what shall be left to the separate states. Great Britain is better off without a written constitution. The scheme of checks and balances is wrong in theory and bad in practise. Men will nearly always rise to the level of the responsibility put on them. The existing lack of responsibility demoralizes the legislature; placing responsibility on the individual autocrat makes, as a rule, a good autocrat; but that is not what democracy wants. The president should be only the executive officer of the congress. ”

“ If the psychologist can not be shut out of the physical world, still less can he be excluded from the sphere of the so-called normative sciences. If any one takes a modern work on ethics or esthetics and tries to separate the treatment of 'what is' from that of 'what ought to be' he will find himself engaged in an idle task.
It appears that the limits of a science are set largely by a psychological constant. A single science has practically the range that can be covered by a single mind or man. ”

“ As I claim for psychology the freedom of the universe in its subject-matter, so I believe that every method of science can be used by the psychologist. The two great achievements of science have been the elaboration of the quantitative method on the one hand and of the genetic method on the other. ”

“ Women have long been goddesses, queens, prostitutes and slaves; it is clearly time that they should have exactly the same political, legal and economic rights as men. Women are on the whole more sympathetic, patient, personal, emotional, illogical than men. These traits would probably improve political conditions; but this is almost irrelevant. Universal suffrage is simply the presupposition of democracy. Children are also human beings, and their votes should be cast by their parents. ”

“ Research institutions could be established by states or by private endowment; for the scientific work which is not primarily of benefit to a single individual or even to a single nation, can most properly be supported by all. By the establishment of an international university the nations would in part repay, or at least acknowledge, the debt which they owe to science for its services on behalf of the peace and welfare of the world. ”

“ I have some sympathy with the students who call 'C' the 'gentleman's grade.' But if grades had some real meaning, they would be no more invidious than the payment of a salary of $3,000 to one man and of $5,000 to another. If it is said that the method is unfair because grades can not be given in accordance with exact deserts, it may be replied that this is true of all salaries and the like. Although a single grade is subject to a considerable probable error, the error of the average of a number of grades decreases as the square root of the number. ”

“ If psychology is defined as the 'science of mind' or, what in my opinion is better, 'the science of minds' the tautology is equal, and it appears to be more possible to determine by an inductive study the professional interests of psychologists than to define the nature of mind or consciousness. Further, I am not convinced that psychology should be limited to the study of consciousness as such, in so far as this can be set off from the physical world. Psychology apart from consciousness is doubtless an absurdity, but so also is mathematics or botany. ”

“ An income tax promotes lying, but it should be adopted, and the sworn statements of all incomes and expenditures beyond the average should be made public. No one deserves more than, say, four times the average income. A man's services may be worth more than that, but they are made possible by the organization of society. A progressive tax averaging fifty per cent, on incomes above $5,000 would be desirable, if it could be collected. Every one who spends much more than the average should be placed under the supervision of the state. ”

“ Another great service for peace to be credited to science is the development of commerce, travel and intercommunication. Steam and electricity are handmaids of peace. Trade disputes and the misadventures of missionaries, travelers and immigrants may serve as causes or pretexts of wars, but the balance of commerce, travel and immigration is large on the side of peace. With the existing commerce among the nations, each dependent on every other, a war of any kind does injury to all. A nation at war destroys its own property throughout the world, and all the nations suffer. ”

“ It is generally assumed that a psychologist must be either an interactionist or a parallelist. According to the definitions with which our psychologies start, it is indeed true that mind and matter must either interact or in some way correspond without interaction. If the psychologist asserts that each brain is a center for the creation of new energy or for interference with the configuration of a material system, he obviously subverts the principal generalizations of physical science. ”

“ The industrial slavery which has resulted from the passing from individual production to group production can be abolished only by group ownership. The group might be the community, but when possible it should be those who work in the factory, cultivate the farm, sail the ship, etc. The ownership and conduct of industries should be vested where the maximum economic efficiency and conditions most favorable to those who work will result. We all agree that the nation should own and manage the postoffice, the states the roads, the cities the water supply. ”

“ I should not be willing to select a fellow or an assistant in psychology by such a method, and to select a professor would be nearly as absurd as to choose a wife as the result of a written examination on her duties. ”

“ We are still far from having a true political and social democracy. The production of wealth has increased rapidly; but we have not learned to distribute it justly or to use it wisely. The education supplied by our schools is inadequate and inept. We may be confident that a complete democracy will be the strongest force for peace that the world has seen. Even now the great mass of the people, most of them having some education and some property, are the true guarantees against wanton war. ”

“ But when the subjective idealist wants to live in a world with other men, he reinvents the distinctions that he had verbally obliterated. What he knows about the physical world is what his senses and the physicists tell him; if he likes to call it all consciousness or the unconscious, mind-stuff, will or God's thought, this may be emotionally stimulating, but no fact or law is thereby altered. The world may be God's thought, without in the least preventing the parallelist from thinking illogically. ”

“ The extermination, despoliation and subjugation of the non-Caucasian races may be the world's great tragedy, and in so far as some of these peoples are able to adopt our science there will be a readjustment which may be written in blood or may be a triumph of common sense and justice. However this may be, the invincibility that science has conferred on the western nations has made them safe from attack and invasion, and while it may on occasion have led to wanton aggression, it has, on the whole, limited warfare. ”

“ Although those who make their psychology coterminous with introspection can not enter far into this field, they still have their own genetic problems. In whatever direction we turn the harvest is waiting; it is only the reapers who are few. Almost every observation, experiment or theory of organic evolution offers parallel problems for the psychologist. The development of the individual opens questions more numerous and more important for psychology than does the development of the body for other sciences. ”

“ But it is not certain that such ingenuous commingling of the mental and the physical worlds is more repugnant to common sense or natural science than the logical subtleties of the schools, which undertake to define, relate or obliterate them. ”

“ It may be the prerogative of the student of psychology to write the biography of an infant, but he has not hitherto penetrated very far into its real life. I disagree completely with the eminent psychologist to whom the plan of this great congress is chiefly due when he claims that 'the presuppositions with which a science starts decide for all time the possibilities of its outer extension.' Sciences are not immutable species, but developing organisms. Their fundamental conceptions and methods at any period can only be approached by a research into work actually accomplished. ”

“ The determination of the validity of the grades given to college students and their standardization appear to me to be important because I regard it as desirable that students should be credited for the work they do rather than for the number of hours that they attend courses. By our present method a student who fails gets no credit at all, while a student who is nearly as bad (and perhaps worse) gets as much credit towards his degree as the best student in the class. ”

“ The question of the practical applications, of psychology is the last which I shall touch. There are those who hold that there is something particularly noble in art for art's sake or in science divorced from any possible application. We are told of the mathematician who boasted that his science was a virgin that had never been prostituted by being put to any use. It is doubtless true that science justifies itself if it satisfies mental needs. It may also be true that pure science should precede the applications of science. ”

“ ONE of the verses in the treasure-house of Greek letters warns us against calling any man happy before he is dead. The greatest living English author lets one of his favorite characters say: 'But does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?' Such reflections may well lead us to distrust any attempt, by one in the ranks, to sum up the fundamental conceptions and methods of a science, especially of a young and growing science. ”

“ The writer, a psychologist by profession, knows very well that a scientific man may be correct and cautious in his researches, but unwise and rash in other relations of life. None the less it is true that the spread of scientific education and of scientific investigation is slowly leading to objective points of view and moral conduct in daily life. The scientific spirit is a pervasive and permanent force making for the world's peace. ”

“ The hundred thousand physicians of our country, its fifty thousand engineers, its ten thousand men of science engaged in research, form an army more inspiring to the imagination than soldiers idling in barracks or confined in the venereal wards of hospitals. ”

“ I see no reason why the application of systematized knowledge to the control of human nature may not in the course of the present century accomplish results commensurate with the nineteenth century applications of physical science to the material world.
The present function of a physician, a lawyer, a clergyman, a teacher or a man of business is to a considerable extent that of an amateur psychologist. In the inevitable specialization of modern society, there will become increasing need of those who can be paid for expert psychological advice. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the psychologist modestly admits that mind does not affect the physical order, he runs counter to the principal generalization of biological science. If pleasure and pain, memory and forethought, are of no use in the struggle for organic survival, why should they ever have evolved?
It requires less temerity to question the theories of biology than to deny the laws of physics. The survival of the fit may be regarded as a truism rather than as a discovery, if we call that fit which does survive. ”

“ As population increases under a given condition of culture, the number of men of genius and talent competent to make the labor of each more efficient increases in proportion; as their inventions are of benefit to all, the means of subsistence tend to increase as the square of the population. As the level of education and culture is raised, and as democracy is perfected, so that each is given opportunity to do the work for which he is fit, the wealth and means of subsistence increase still more rapidly. ”

“ The population of a civilized country, in which science is cultivated, need not be limited by famine, pestilence or war. Over-population and the need of expansion by conquest are obviated by democracy and science; the cause of war which may be regarded as inevitable and legitimate is thus abolished. In providing adequately for the subsistence of an increasing population, science has made a contribution to peace the magnitude of which can not be easily overstated. ”

“ The national congress should not do what state legislatures can do equally well, or the state legislature interfere with local government. The inequality and artificial boundaries of the states, the disastrous growth of cities, the heterogeneous and changing population, are among the conditions which make local government difficult. But the nation should not lord it over the states, the state over the county or city, the county or city over its local units, these over the group or family, the group or family over the individual. ”