A commemorative occasion justifies a retrospective, though hardly a reminiscent mood. The personal justification lies in the fact that I speak as one of a small group-in this and all countries-who have held a monogamous professorship of psychology for a quarter century. The contrast of then and now stands forth partly as a shift in intellectual temperament, partly as a diverging succession of interests. Both are responsible for the historical moving-picture, which to our near vision still

more »

... rs by reason of imperfect fusion. The dominant interest under which I began to profess psychology was clearly the experimental one; it set a novel and a positive programme. Equally assertive was the physiological plank. The two stamped one's alliance, in a sense made one a partisan. The emblem of the one was the laboratory, of the other an evolutionary faith and a sense of the reality of the body in the affairs of mind. They might have been emblazoned as a Hipp chronoscope rampant, and a copy of Darwin couchant. The bearer of this coat-of-arms was in many quarters under suspicion. He was more than a radical, less than a renegade. By implication he was challenging the accredited "mental science" of the colleges, which was a branch-in some cases a stunted twig-of philosophy, and a perquisite of the president. At educational gatherings-even more inconsequential and vaporous then than now-he was asked to defend the superiority of experi-1 Address given on the occasion of the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the American Psychological Association, New York, December 28, 1916. 249