The Place of Psychology in the System of Sciences

Abstract

As we know it today, modern psychology originated contemporaneously with the physical sciences and has been more or less connected with them throughout its development. To be sure, it has not known the continuity distinctive of the physical sciences. Nor has it known that series of progressive successes which constitute the prestige of physics and owing to which physics has been and still is called upon to make the major, if not the exclusive contribution to the formation of a scientific conception of the universe. The course taken by the development of psychology is much more sinuous. Its development was frequently interrupted as a result of the fact that psychological studies often took directions which, sooner or later, revealed themselves to be blind alleys. At any event, the beginnings of psychological studies worthy of being qualified as “scientific,” in the modern sense of the term, go back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.