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gle with Athenæus we see the hot becoming pure heat, which is fire, and we then wonder ourselves a little whether qualities are corporeal or not, so bewildered do we become with the phraseology. Is there, then, such a thing as hot heat? That is what Galen seems, when we have become quite helpless, to be driving at in his discourse with Lycus. By means of our appreciation of a hot fire we conjecture he is speaking really of the degrees of heat (the strength of its own activity, Galen puts it), and again we find his feet unawares in the right path. Then a thing is whiter, he says, because it has in it more of whiteness. Thus he hands on to the puerility of the Middle Ages the sophisms of antiquity. Thus he drifts into the common error in primitive thought, much heightened doubtless by the contention of Plato that after all ideas are the only realities; but back of it all we see the mind of primitive man utterly unable to differentiate the material from the spiritual. That was the heritage Plato had from an intellectual heredity already remote in his time. We see the trace of it with especial distinctness in this spurious book on the corporeality of the qualities, deeply tinged with theological infusions.

In résumé we may say, then, that Galen, with the good backing of Hippocrates and Aristotle, denied monistic doctrines and their corollary of mutability. This in reality was probably necessary for the advance of knowledge since the complexity of the problem, as we now know it, was simplified by the false stand taken, but his great predecessors did not anywhere in their genuine works state it as uncompromisingly as did Galen. "It may be boldly asserted earth, fire, air and water are the primary and common elements of all things, since these constitute those bodies which are included in the totality of things first of all and the most elementary to that degree that all other things, vegetable, I insist, as well as animal, are made from these.'"14 Whether sensation is present in some one or other of them or results from a combination of them he is not so sure. The perception of the qualities depends on this, he seems to think, and though there are numerous others, those of the hot and cold and moist and dry are the fundamental qualities from which the others arise. All this Galen must have absorbed from his environment and from his great predecessors among the ancient Greeks. He scarcely made a single addition to their philosophy or contributed an argument that had not been used before. Yet his dogmatism, for good or for evil, crystallized the hitherto fluid thought of the older nature philosophers, so that it stood the neglect of a thousand years, and thereafter the assault of new ideas for almost half as long.

14 Galeni de elementis ex Hippocrate, Liber I, p. 456.

THE READING OF CHARACTER FROM
EXTERNAL SIGNS

THE

By Professor KNIGHT DUNLAP

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

HE relations between general psychology and individual psychology are important and not hard to grasp. Neither can be separated from the other in practice, but each has its set of problems and its complement of special methods. The problems of general psychology concern the determination of laws and principles applying to the human animal generally, which are either independent of individual peculiarities or inclusive of these idiosyncrasies as definite combinations of general factors, not as exceptions. The problems of individual psychology, on the other hand, concern the discovery of those factors of difference between individuals; thus, ultimately, the description of the important respects in which each individual varies from other individuals, and in as far as classification is useful, the assigning of each individual to the class or classes in which he belongs. The specific methods of general psychology are included under the general term experiment; the methods of individual psychology under the term mental measurement. The most obvious relation between the two branches is through the fact that reliable mental measures (commonly called mental tests) can be developed only through experimentation of the most rigorous kind, and the fact that general principles can be obtained only by taking into account the individual differences of the various reactors on whom experimental work is done. One of the most unfortunate and harmful details of the present enthusiastic movement in the individual psychology, in education, in industry, and in medicine, is the naïve assumption that persons ignorant of general psychology and untrained in experimental psychology can develop and apply mental tests in a useful way without the careful supervision of competent psychologists. The deleterious results of such bungling work on children, for example, are apparent not only in the harm to the children. and needless trouble and expense to which parents are put, but also in the prejudices aroused in the public mind against mental measurements as a result of the mistakes of amateurs. Equally unfortunate results are frequent in the legal, medical and indus

trial applications of amateur psychology. The general recognition of the need of individual psychology in commerce and industry in particular has led to the existence of a class of mere exploiters, many of whom reap large financial rewards from their practices, and whose eventual effect on the manufacturers and business men they victimize is to turn them against the application of real psychology.

Mental measurements have so far been developed to the point where effective determinations of general intelligence are madedeterminations which are of value not only for schools and colleges, but also for commerce and industry. No psychologist claims that these measurements are completely satisfactory, and we all know that they are being constantly improved, and will be enormously improved in the future. On the other hand, no one but the psychologist knows the amount of time, labor and personal training required for the development and standardization of even the simplest test. The public, impressed by the apparent simplicity of the materials, assumes that any one can make up a test, and the public is right so far: any one can make up a test, and almost every one does, but the tests are not worth anything. The public either does not see this, or, if it does see it, assumes that the tests made up by the expert are also worthless. For some of the confusion the psychologists themselves are partly responsible. For example, the nomenclature of "mental ages" as established by intelligence tests, which should never have been allowed to escape from the laboratories, has very much confused and prejudiced the public.

In addition to tests of "general intelligence" (which may most safely be defined as that which standard intelligence tests measure), tests for special intellectual capacities have been developed. We can now measure ability to sustain and to distribute the attention, ability to perceive accurately details of various kinds, ability to learn, ability to avoid learning, and many other special abilities of this class. The field of such measurements is rapidly being extended, and it now requires merely the application of the labor of the trained psychologist to develop systematic tests for the special combinations of intellectual abilities required in any branch of any trade or profession.

But this is the limit to which mental measurements so far have extended. Emotional and moral characteristics are not as yet measurable. Yet we know that these characteristics are of immense importance in all the divisions of life in which we are measuring intellectual capacity. Even as concerns the candidate for admission to college, while it is important to determine his

intellectual capacity, emotional and moral factors ought to be known. There is many a man who goes down or barely survives in college, whose intellectual ability is sufficiently good, but who will not work, or who will get into trouble because of moral delinquency, or whose scale of values is inadequate.

I do not say that we shall never be able to measure these characteristics by the methods of individual psychology; in fact, I think that ultimately we shall compass such measurement. A number of us are now at work on the problem of moral measurements, and I think the prospects for development along this line are favorable. But at present we do not pretend to make standardized measurements of emotional and moral capacity.

Wherever there is a great need, attempts to fill it will be made; these attempts will not all be scientific, and not all made in good faith, especially if there is a prospect of fat remuneration. The historical development of medicine is an illustration of this fact. Medical practice developed long before there was any known basis for it, and the bane of the medical profession to-day is the tendency to apply something in cases where there is really nothing to apply -a tendency against which Osler and other medical leaders have protested emphatically, and with some success.

The past lack of scientific means of measuring intelligence, and the lack of scientific means of measuring moral and emotional characteristics, together with the real need for such measures, has led to the development of unscientific methods of mental diagnosis which are popularly designated as character analysis. These methods are based on the assumption that there is a close relation between the anatomy of the individual and his mental characteristics, and that the details of this relationship may be discovered by casual examination, without the aid of statistical methods or experimental procedure, by persons ignorant not only of psychology but even of the rudiments of physiology.

The first systematic attempt at the development of character analysis was made by the phrenologists. The physiologist Gall early in the nineteenth century began to teach that the mental life is largely dependent upon the brain, especially upon the cerebral hemispheres. This fact was not widely recognized before the time of Gall, although it has become a commonplace since then, and Gall's work had a large influence in bringing this recognition about. But Gall and his disciples are also responsible for the introduction into psychology of several misleading conceptions concerning the relation of the brain to consciousness-conceptions which have re

tarded the development of psychology and which are being eliminated but slowly. Gall and his pupil Spurzheim developed a theory of the relation of the brain to mind which they called phrenology, which means literally the study of the intellect. These phrenologists believed that the different faculties or capacities of the mind were localized, each in specific portions of the cortex or outer surface of the cerebral hemispheres. They further believed that the relative development of each of these faculties depended upon the relative size of the portions of the brain in which the respective faculties were supposed to reside. Highly developed philoprogenitiveness, or love of children, for example, was supposed to depend upon a cortex relatively thicker in the philoprogenitive area than is the cortex in the same area of a person less strongly philoprogenitive. Finally, since they supposed the conformation of the skull to agree with the relative thickness of the cortex it encloses, they assumed the possibility of diagnosing the development of various cortical areas by examination of the outer surface of the cranium. The surface of the head was accordingly mapped off into a number of small areas, each associated with one of the faculties in the phrenological list; and from the relative depression or elevation of these areas the phrenologist attempted to read the "character" of the subject.

We need not dwell upon the series of bold assumptions involved in this system, since, from the scientific point of view, the system is of historical interest only. Quite aside from the further development of phrenology as a technique, it had a profound and on the whole unfortunate influence upon the course of psychobiology for many years. Physiologists and psychologists fell into the habit of assuming that consciousness is dependent upon brain activity in a remarkably simple way, ignoring the complicated interrelations of the various parts of the nervous system, and ignoring the fundamental function of the total nervous system in the control of movements through sensory stimulation. Moreover, both the psychologists and the physiologists accepted even the phrenological doctrine of the localization of conscious functions in specifie parts of the cortex, although the functions as thus localized by the physiologists were not the "faculties" of the phrenologists, but a more generalized group, including the senses. It is only within the last fifteen years that psychologists have begun to reject the phrenological theory, and many physiologists still cling to it.

As an art, phrenology had a wide popular vogue and is still practiced lucratively in the United States, there being at least one school in which the system is taught. It has, however, sunk to a position of relatively minor importance, and has been largely

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