ABSTRACT
Psychology, then, is the scientific study of the workings of mind as seen in the behaviour of living things and as experienced in our own consciousness. The very instability of life and its limitations, its power of variability under the stress of any chance incident or external condition, its power of registering past experience and turning it to future use, and its power of adapting itself to different environments—all this makes the results obtained from experiment and observation, where life is concerned, less exact than those obtained by applying experiment and observation to inanimate things. The classification of thought processes that could be isolated by analysis had degenerated by the middle of the last century into an academic pursuit with little bearing on the practical affairs of life. Obsessions and 'phobias’, varying degrees of insanity, hysteria, loss of memory, cases of double or even multiple personality—all such things present problems alike for the pathologist and for the psychologist.
