THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY AT HARVARD 407 
not tb mention those of evolution. 
Experimental psychology, as a system¬ 
atic science, is almost younger than 
its youngest students. The mental laws 
are as fixed and as determinable as the 
laws of physics. Who then shall say 
what man shall come to know of men¬ 
tal composition, of the great mental 
universe, and of ourselves, its wander¬ 
ing planets, since minds may be known 
as. well as stars ! 
But psychology will not have to wait 
till its greater laws shall be wholly es¬ 
tablished before she becomes of prac¬ 
tical influence in common affairs. He 
who reads most thoughtfully to-day 
will most appreciate . this truth. He 
who reads at all, 
reads of “ individu¬ 
alism” as opposed 
to “socialism.” 
The Pope of Rome 
has declared that 
the “preoccupy¬ 
ing ” problem for 
active Christianity 
must now be the in¬ 
dustrial problem. 
Every important 
treatise on the sub¬ 
ject, appearing at 
present, admits that 
the crucial ques¬ 
tion of the indus¬ 
trial problem is an 
eth i cal problem, 
and every ethical 
treatise, that every 
ethical problem is a 
psychological problem. Two years ago 
the Roman Catholic Church established 
a psychological laboratory in its lead¬ 
ing American college. 
The Presbyterians the coming year 
will follow with a laboratory at Prince¬ 
ton. Psychology is no longer feared by 
religion, but is accepted, though in 
places yet too timidly, as a source of its 
further and unending revelation. 
But psychology is coming close to 
affairs of church and state in more 
than one way, One of the greatest 
crimes of. modern society is its con¬ 
ception of criminal jurisprudence. Be¬ 
tween the fœtal period and adult life 
man passes through, in abridged series, 
all the degrees of evolution that have 
GUSTAVE THEODORE FECHNEK, 
led up through the lower animal stages 
to his own. In early infancy, and even 
in childhood, he is not yet wholly man ; 
not yet safely over the brute period of 
his lineal development. If the domes¬ 
tic calf and chicken spend their first 
days wild in the woods, this pre¬ 
domestic environment will seize upon 
and develop their pre-domestic traits; 
and these once set, no amount of 
domestic training will, thereafter, make 
calf or chicken anything else than a 
wild, untamable creature. The early 
instinctive periods of man’s progeny 
are, more prolonged, more delicate, and 
more susceptible than those of lower 
animals, yet are of the same nature. If 
left to evil environ¬ 
ment in early years 
the latent brute 
within him will 
surely lay hold of. 
its own, and ripen 
the yet innocent 
child to a creature 
bearing the same re¬ 
lation to the moral 
and civilized man 
that the wild wolf 
does to the house¬ 
dog. 
On the other 
hand, the wolf 
w’hose first lair is 
the hunter’s hearth, 
grows to share it 
lovingly with the 
hunter’s children. 
The government 
hordes of children 
to-day the criminal quar¬ 
ters of its great cities, and abandons 
them to ripen their pre-civilized propen¬ 
sities under such evil influences, be¬ 
comes itself the foster-father of its own 
crimes ; nurses its own children to fill 
its poorhouses, and raises its own 
youths to fill its prisons. Psychology, 
if on mere ground of financial econ¬ 
omy alone, will yet force criminal 
jurisprudence to begin its work before, 
rather than after, this early period of 
“ unalterable penalty,” 
The benefits of a psychological train¬ 
ing to the medical man are now so 
obvious, as to make a knowledge of 
psychology imperative for every first- 
that ignores 
which crowd 
the