Science & Tech Quote by James M. Baldwin

Baldwin is drawing a boundary line at a moment when psychology was still fighting for its seat at the grown-ups' table. By insisting that psychology is "like all science" and therefore "knowledge", he’s not offering a calm definition so much as a credential. Late-19th and early-20th century psychology had to justify itself against two rivals: philosophy, which claimed the mind as its traditional territory, and the harder sciences, which suspected "mind" was too slippery to measure. Baldwin’s phrasing is a strategic double move meant to satisfy both camps.

The repetition of "like science again" does quiet rhetorical work. It’s a drumbeat of affiliation: psychology doesn’t merely borrow methods from science; it belongs to the same category of disciplined knowing. Then he tightens the screw with "a definite thing". That adjective is doing the heaviest lifting in the sentence. "Definite" rebukes the idea that mind is a mist of introspection, metaphysics, or moral speculation. Baldwin is arguing that the mind can be treated as an object with boundaries - not necessarily a physical object, but one stable enough to study systematically.

The subtext is almost bureaucratic: if psychology has a "definite thing" as its object, it deserves institutional legitimacy, laboratories, journals, funding, and authority. It’s also a warning to his own field. Make psychology about everything (character, the soul, social reform, spiritual insight) and you risk becoming nothing in particular. Define the mind as a knowable target, and you inherit science’s prestige - along with its constraints.