15
It is not true therefore that the psychical sciences have said
their last word and that we have nothing more to expect from
them. They have but just awakened or reawakened; and, to postdate
Guyau's prediction by a hundred years, we might say, with them in
our minds, that the twentieth century "will end with discoveries
as ill-formulated but perhaps as important in the moral world as
those of Newton and Laplace in the astronomical world." But,
though we have much to hope from them, that is no reason why we
should look to them for everything and abandon in their favour
that which has brought us where we are. The choice of which we
spoke, between the brain and the subconsciousness, has been made
long ago; and it is not our part to make it over again. We are
carried along by a force acquired in the course of two or three
thousand years; and our methods, like our intellectual habits,
have of themselves become transformed into sort of minor
subconsciousness superposed upon the major subconsciousness and
sometimes mingling with it. Henri Bergson, in his very fine
presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research on the
28th of May, 1913, said that he had sometimes wondered what would
have happened if modern science, instead of setting out from
mathematics, instead of bringing all its forces to converge on
the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of mind; if
Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for instance, had been psychologists:
"We should certainly," said he, "have had a psychology of which
to-day we can form no idea, any more than before Galileo we could
have imagined what our physics would be; a psychology that
probably would have been to our present psychology what our
physics is to Aristotle's.
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