Journal of Mental Science, 1922 e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. In adopting our title of the ffournal of Mental Science, published by authority of the medico-psychological Association, we profess that we cultivate in our pages mental science of'a particular kind, namely, such mental science as appertains to medical men who are engaged in the treatment of the insane. But it has been objected that the term mental science is inapplicable, and that the term mental physiology or mental pathology, or psychology, or psychiatry (a term much affected by our German brethren), would have been more correct and ap pr0priate; and that, moreover, we do not deal in mental science, which is pro perly the sphere of the aspiring metaphysical intellect. If mental science is strictly synonymous with metaphysics, these objections are certainly valid; for although we do not eschew metaphysical discussion, the aim of this journal is certainly bent upon more attainable objects than the pursuit of those recondite inquiries which have occupied the most ambitious intellects from the time of Plato to the present, with so much labour and so little result. But while we admit that metaphysics may be called one department of mental science, we main tain that mental physiology and mental pathology are also mental science under a different aspect. While metaphysics may be called speculative mental science, mental physiology and pathology, with their vast range of inquiry into insanity, education, crime, and all things which tend to preserve mental health, or to pro duce mental disease, are not less questions of mental science in its practical, that is in its sociological point of view. If it were not unjust to high mathematics to compare it in any way with abstruse metaphysics, it would illustrate our meaning to say that our practical mental science would fairly bear the same rela tion to the mental science of the metaphysicians as applied mathematics bears to the pure science. In both instances the aim of the pure science is the attainment of abstract truth; its