ody understands. No destiny is more melancholy than that of the
dialectical prophet, who makes more rigid and tyrannous every day a
message which every day grows less applicable and less significant.

[Sidenote: Scientific psychology a part of biology.]

That remaining portion of psychology which is a science, and a science
of matters of fact, is physiological; it belongs to natural history and
constitutes the biology of man. Soul, which was not originally
distinguished from life, is there studied in its natural operation in
the body and in the world. Psychology then remains what it was in
Aristotle's _De Anima_--an ill-developed branch of natural science,
pieced out with literary terms and perhaps enriched by occasional
dramatic interpretations. The specifically mental or psychic element
consists in the feeling which accompanies bodily states and natural
situations. This feeling is discovered and distributed at the same time
that bodies and other material objects are defined; for when a man
begins to decipher permanent and real things, and to understand that
they are merely material, he thereby sets apart, in contrast with such
external objects, those images and emotions which can no longer enter
into the things' texture. The images and emotions remain, however,
attached to those things, for they are refractions of them through
bodily organs, or effects of their presence on the will, or passions
fixed upon them as their object.

In parts of biology which do not deal with man observers do not hesitate
to refer in the same way to the pain, the desire, the intention, which
they may occasionally read in an animal's aspect. Darwin, for instance,
constantly uses psychical language: his birds love one another's plumage
and their aesthetic charms are factors in natural selection. Such little
fables do not detract from the scientific value of Darwin's
observations, because we see at once what the fables mean. The
description keeps close enough to the facts observed for the reader to
stop at the latter, rather than at the language in which they are
stated. In the natural history of man such interpretation into mental
terms, such microscopic romance, is even easier and more legitimate,
because language allows people, perhaps before their feelings are long
past, to describe them in terms which are understood to refer directly
to mental experience. The sign's familiarity, to be sure, often hides in
these cases a great vagueness a