The mind at work : a handbook of applied psychology / edited by Geoffrey Rhodes.

Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mind at work : a handbook of applied psychology / edited by Geoffrey Rhodes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    59/252 (page 47)
    up a question very important in all sciences, but especially in those relating to conduct as con- trasted with appearance—the question of ter- minology. Even in the physical sciences, which describe what can be seen and touched, special terms, technical nomenclatures, have to be em- ployed to embody and communicate the facts to be recorded. But in the mental sciences we are dealing with the operations of a mind which cannot be seen or touched or measured by the physical senses. To describe these operations we have only the terms of everyday experience relating to material things, the objects of sense perception. The application of these terms, hackneyed by common use and obscured by association with all kinds of things not strictly connoted by them, has been found incompatible with the clearness and precision of the physical sciences to whose subject-matter such terms especially apply. Much greater, then, is their unfitness for use in sciences whose subject-matter is alien to them. But to invent a whole series of new terms for processes which have been dis- cussed in familiar speech is to deprive the science of its apparent relation to life, and to disgust and weary the beginner. A mean must be sought by which precision may be obtained, and separation from life avoided. In Psychology the compromise has been much in favour of the common speech,