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11 Genetic Treatment a marked characteristic of Modern Empirical Psychology The constant aim of modern psychology is to analyze all complex mental operations into their simplest elements and to trace back to their first beginning all acquired or composite habits and faculties, and to show how they have been generated or could have been generated from the fewest original aptitudes or fundamental activities of the mind. This is sound scientific procedure — recognized in the Scholastic aphorism, Entia non sunt multiplicanda prœter necessitatem. We may not postulate a special faculty for any mental state which can be accounted for by the co-operation of already recognized activities of the soul. But the labor and skill devoted during the past century and a half to this combined analytic and synthetic procedure has developed one feature of modern psychology by which it is differentiated in a most marked manner from that of the Middle Ages and of Aristotle. The present-day treatment is pronouncedly genetic. Thus, whilst the Schoolmen in their account of mental operations, such as perception, conception, or desire, considered these processes almost solely as elicited by the normal adult human being already in full possession and control of matured mental powers, the chief interest of the modern psychologist is to trace the growth of these powers from their first and simplest manifestations in infancy, and to discriminate what is the product of experience and acquired habits from that which is the immediate outcome of the innate capabilities of the soul. This is particularly noticeable if we compare the treatment of the mental operation of perception as given in most Scholastic textbooks with that to be found in any modern handbook of psychology. The point of view is usually quite different. Since much of the most plausible modern attacks on Scholastic psychological doctrine has been made in this manner, the genetic treatment from the Thomist standpoint of many psychological questions seems to us to be among the most urgent tasks imposed nowadays on the neo-Scholastic psychologist. The value of such work from a philosophical standpoint would seem to be distinctly greater than that of any results likely to be achieved in quantitative experimental psychology. Obviously there is nothing in the Thomistic conception of the soul and its operations incompatible with a diligent investigation into the unfolding of its various aptitudes and powers. |
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