Psychotherapy | Page 3

rising. If the signs are not deceitful, this new movement may reach its historical climax a few decades hence, when new leaders may give to the idealistic view of the world the same classical expression which Darwin and others gave to the receding naturalistic age. The signs are clear indeed that the days of idealistic philosophy and of art, and of religion, are approaching; that the world is tired of merely connecting facts without asking what their ultimate meaning is. The world dimly feels again that technical civilization alone cannot make life more worth living. The aim of the last generation was to explain the world; the aim of the next generation will be to interpret the world; the one was seeking laws, the other will seek ideals.
Psychotherapy stands in the service of both; it is the last word of the passing naturalistic movement, and yet in another way it tries to be the first word of the coming idealistic movement; and because it is under the influence of both, it speaks sometimes the language of the one, and sometimes the language of the other. That brings about a confusion and a disorder which must be detrimental. To transform this vagueness into clear, distinct relations is the immediate duty of science.
Indeed it may be said that psychotherapy is the last word of a naturalistic age, because psychotherapy finds its real stronghold in a systematic study of the mental laws, and such study of mental laws, psychology, must indeed be the ultimate outcome of a naturalistic view of the world. Realism begins with the analysis of lifeless nature, begins with the study of the stars and the stones, of masses and of atoms. At a higher level, it turns then to the living organism, studies plants and animals and even brings the human organism entirely under the point of view of natural law. When science has thus mastered the whole physical universe, it finally brings even the mental life of man under the naturalistic point of view, treats his inner experiences like any outer objects, tears them in pieces, analyzes them, and studies them as functions of the nervous system. A scientific psychology is thus reached which is the climax of realism, because it means that even the ideas and emotions and volitions of man are treated as natural phenomena, that their causes are sought and that their effects are determined, that their laws are found out. To apply this realistic knowledge of the mind in the interest of therapy is merely to use it in the same way in which the engineer uses his knowledge of physics, when he wants to harness outer nature. As that is possible only when theoretical science has reached a certain height of development, it can indeed be said that practical psychotherapy on a scientific basis can be considered almost as the ultimate point of a realistic movement; it cannot set in until psychology has reached high development, and psychology cannot set in unless biology has preceded it.
There is no doubt that we are still far from this last phase of the realistic period. The practical application of scientific psychology is still a new problem. Experimental psychology began about twenty-five years ago; at that time there existed one psychological laboratory. To-day there is no university in the world which does not have a psychological workshop. But laboratories for applied psychology are only arising in these present days, and the systematic application of scientific psychology to education and law and industry and social life and medicine is almost at its beginning. While the height of the last realistic wave was in the period of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, of the last century, its last phase, the practical application of physiological psychology, including psychotherapy, is only at its commencement.
But while this last great movement has not yet reached its end, the new idealistic movement to come has not yet reached a clear self-expression. A general philosophical interest can be felt, but a great philosophical synthesis seems still lacking. A new sense of duty can vaguely be felt, but great new tasks have not yet found common acknowledgment. Above all, the unshaped emotionalism of the masses has not yet been brought into any real contact with the new idealism which grows up on the higher level of scholarly thought. But it is evident, if a new great mood of idealism is to come, one of its popular forerunners must be the demand that the spirit is real in a higher sense than matter, that the mind controls the body, that faith can cure. In such unphilosophic crudeness, no definite thought is expressed, as everything would depend on the definition of spirit, of faith, of mind, of reality. Moreover, every inquiry would prove that the idealistic value of