Excerpt from A History of Psychology, Vol. 2: Medieval and Early Modern Period In view of some criticisms passed upon the former volume, some further remarks may be pardoned. A history of a science is a unique species of history. For the content of the science the student may go to the last textbook, where he may learn the established truths without any reference to their genesis or to the men who established them. For those who require no more a history is super fluous: it can add nothing to that knowledge and may be wholly disregarded. But there is another and a different object for which it has a specific function. If the student is not to be left with the idea that knowledge is a fixed quantity of indisputable facts, if on the contrary he is to acquire a real understanding of the process by which know ledge is continually made and remade, he must learn to look at the movement of ideas without prejudice as a separate fact with its own significance and its own meaning for humanity. To despise forgotten theories because they no longer hold good, and refuse on that account to look backward, is in the end to forget that man's highest ambition is to make progress possible, to make the truth of to-day into the error of yesterday - in short, to make history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.