Like other sciences which have gradually emerged from a pre-scientific state, psychology arose when man began to ruminate on the mystery of life and the ways of human beings. The general facts of knowing, striving, feeling, desiring, willing, and so forth, were recognized and expressed in the common sense of people and expressed in perhaps a crude form in the customs language—folk-lore and myths of early times. In the attempt on the part of thinkers to find a rational explanation and a systematic grouping of such facts lay the beginnings of scientific psychology, the science of the psyche.

Professor Spearman traces the rise of psychology and the course it has taken throughout the ages to the present day, carrying the reader pleasantly and not too arduously through the intricacies of opposing ideas and theories as these have in successive epochs come to the fore.