Daily Inspiration Quote by Stanley Smith Stevens

The phrase reads like a mission statement from the mid-century lab: tidy the mess, declare what counts, and move the field closer to engineering than armchair speculation. Stevens isn’t selling psychology as a humane art or a grand theory of the soul; he’s pitching it as an enterprise that can be inventoried. “Systematize” is the power word here. It implies that psychology, circa mid-century, had accumulated findings faster than it had agreed on how to organize them. “Digest” borrows from bureaucratic and scientific review culture: knowledge isn’t just discovered, it’s processed into a usable form. “Appraise” adds a quietly judgmental edge, signaling that not all results deserve equal status.

The intent is practical and disciplinary. A “technical survey” does more than summarize; it sets standards. In Stevens’s era, psychology was negotiating its identity between behaviorism’s measurable rigor, the postwar boom in applied research (human factors, testing, perception), and emerging challenges from cognitive approaches. Funding, military relevance, and the prestige economy of science pushed the field toward methods that looked clean on paper: operational definitions, quantification, replicable apparatus. Stevens himself, famous for psychophysics and measurement theory, had a stake in making “state of psychology” synonymous with what can be measured and scaled.

Subtext: if you can’t be systematized, you’re in danger of being sidelined. The line flatters the reader with the promise of order while quietly narrowing what “psychology” is allowed to be.