In the chief civilised countries this investigation has many distinguished pioneers, such as Prof. Wundt, Prof. T. H. Ribot, and others. In Germany this subject has its most important organ in the journal mentioned above. It numbers among its collaborators some of the most distinguished German physiologists and psychologists. As related to the same subject must be mentioned Wundt's Philosophischen Studien, and partly the Vierteljahrschrift fur Wissenschaftlichie Philosophie. In France, there was founded in 1894, the Annee Psychologique, edited by Binet and Beaunis, and also the Bibliotheque de Pedagogie et de Psychologie, edited by Binet. In England there are the journals, Mind and Brain.
Special laboratories for experimental psychology with psychological apparatus and methods of research are found in many places. In Germany the first to be founded was that of Wundt in the year 1878 at Leipzig. France has a laboratory for experimental psychology at Paris, in the Sorbonne, whose director is Binet; Italy, one in Rome. In America experimental psychology is zealously pursued. As early as 1894, there were in that country twenty-seven laboratories for experimental psychology and four journals. There should also be mentioned the societies for child psychology. Recently one has been founded in Germany, others before this time have been at work in England and America.
A whole series of investigations carried out in Kraepelin's laboratory in Heidelberg are of the greatest value for determining what the brain can do in the way of work and impressions.
An English specialist has maintained that the future, thanks to the modern school system, will be able to get along without originally creative men, because the receptive activities of modern man will absorb the cooperative powers of the brain to the disadvantage of the productive powers. And even if this were not a universally valid statement but only expressed a physiological certainty, people will some day perhaps cease filing down man's brain by that sandpapering process called a school curriculum.
A champion of the transformation of pedagogy into a psycho-physiological science is to be found in Sweden in the person of Prof. Hjalmar Oehrwal who has discussed in his essays native and foreign discoveries in the field of psychology. One of his conclusions is that the so-called technical exercises, gymnastics, manual training, sloyd, and the like, are not, as they are erroneously called, a relaxation from mental overstrain by change in work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue. All work, he finds, done under conditions of fatigue is uneconomic whether one regards the quantity produced or its value as an exercise. Rest should be nothing more than rest,--******* to do only what one wants to, or to do nothing at all. As to fear, he proves, following Binet's investigation in this subject, how corporal discipline, threats, and ridicule lead to cowardice; how all of these methods are to be rejected because they are depressing and tend to a diminution of energy.
He shows, moreover, how fear can be overcome progressively, by strengthening the nervous system and in that way strengthening the character. This result comes about partly when all unnecessary terrorising is avoided, partly when children are accustomed to bear calmly and quietly the inevitable unpleasantnesses of danger.
