Abstract
PSYCHOLOGY was given the status of an independent Section, with the approval of the Sections of Physiology and Education, at the Cardiff meeting of the British Association in 1920. The new Section met for the first time in 1921 under the presidency of Prof. Lloyd Morgan. Thus the present centenary meeting marks also the completion of ten years' existence of our Section. I can vividly recall the doubts which were expressed, not so much in words, as in general attitude, by the Committee of Recommendations of this Association when in 1920 it was asked to consider the formation of a separate Section of Psychology. Such hesitation was probably based on several grounds, not wholly on any one of them. But some of these grounds have lost much of their force to-day, because of the pronounced change that has since taken place in the attitudes and beliefs which were in vogue among physicists of that time. No physicists would then have dared, as now, to cast doubt on the sole sway of determinism in the physical world. None of them would then have suggested, as now, the impossibility of predicting what any individual atom (or still smaller individual entity) will do next. None would have questioned, as now, the universal truth of the second law of thermodynamics or of the principle of conservation of energy. None would have ventured, as now, to suppose that electrons change in the very act of becoming known to us, and that therefore the mental factor is ultimately inseparable from physical investigations. None would then have dared, as now, to conjecture that particles of matter correspond in their properties to certain group waves of the ether, the constituent waves of which, travelling at an enormous speed, ‘guide’ and ‘direct’ the group waves without any energy of their own.
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MYRES, C. On the Nature of Mind*. Nature 128, 744–747 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/128744a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/128744a0