m of our human destiny to estimate his success in
throwing a little more light into its dark recesses. To me it has been
deemed best to assign a colder task. Frederic Myers was a psychologist
who worked upon lines hardly admitted by the more academic branch of the
profession to be legitimate; and as for some years I bore the title of
"Professor of Psychology," the suggestion has been made (and by me gladly
welcomed) that I should spend my portion of this hour in defining the
exact place and rank which we must accord to him as a cultivator and
promoter of the science of the Mind.

Brought up entirely upon literature and history, and interested at first
in poetry and religion chiefly; never by nature a philosopher in the
technical sense of a man forced to pursue consistency among concepts for
the mere love of the logical occupation; not crammed with science at
college, or trained to scientific method by any passage through a
laboratory, Myers had as it were to recreate his personality before he
became the wary critic of evidence, the skilful handler of hypothesis,
the learned neurologist and omnivorous reader of biological and
cosmological matter, with whom in later years we were acquainted. The
transformation came about because he needed to be all these things in
order to work successfully at the problem that lay near his heart; and
the ardor of his will and the richness of his intellect are proved by the
success with which he underwent so unusual a transformation.

The problem, as you know, was that of seeking evidence for human
immortality. His contributions to psychology were incidental to that
research, and would probably never have been made had he not entered on
it. But they have a value for Science entirely independent of the light
they shed upon that problem; and it is quite apart from it that I shall
venture to consider them.

If we look at the history of mental science we are immediately struck by
diverse tendencies among its several cultivators, the consequence being a
certain opposition of schools and some repugnance among their disciples.
Apart from the great contrasts between minds that are teleological or
biological and minds that are mechanical, between the animists and the
associationists in psychology, there is the entirely different contrast
between what I will call the classic-academic and the romantic type of
imagination. The former has a fondness for clean pure lines and noble
simplicity i