[Illustration: GUSTAVE THEODORE FECHNER.]
The laboratory workshop is provided with the common implements and facilities required for working in wood, glass, and metal. Both for original research and for demonstration, this laboratory is the most unique, the richest, and the most complete in any country; and in witness of the fame and genius of its present director, and of the rapidly spreading interest in experimental psychology, particularly in America, there are already gathered here, under Professor Münsterberg's administration, a larger number of students specially devoted to mental science than ever previously studied together in any one place.
THE FUTURE AND INFLUENCE OF THE NEW SCIENCE.
So much for the place and what is done there. Now, what is expected to come from this new psychology? "Do you fellows expect to invent patent ways of thinking?" was once asked me. Who can tell? Who, before Galileo, would have prophesied that man should weigh the stars or know their chemistry? Yet there is much ground for comparison between the position of physical science then and that of mental science now. The popular opinion of to-day is perhaps even less awake to the fact that the world of mental phenomena is a world of laws, susceptible to scientific experimentation, than was the day of Galileo to the similar conception regarding physical phenomena. Have the physical sciences changed aught for man since the sixteenth century? Then we must not forget how slow was the growth, and how long it took to arrive at the laws of gravity and of conservation, not to mention those of evolution. Experimental psychology, as a systematic 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 mental composition, of the great mental universe, and of ourselves, its wandering planets, since minds _may_ be known as well as stars!
[Illustration: PROFESSOR WILHELM WUNDT, OF LEIPSIC, FOUNDER OF FIRST PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY (1878).]
But psychology will not have to wait till its greater laws shall be wholly established before she becomes of practical influence in common affairs. He who reads most thoughtfully to-day will most appreciate this truth. He who reads at all, reads of "individualism" as opposed to "socialism." The Pope of Rome has declared that the "preoccupying" problem for active Christianity must now be the industrial problem. Every important treatise on the subject, appearing at present, admits that the crucial question of the industrial problem is an ethical 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 leading American college.