As a psych major, I found his journal very interesting. On May 25, he writes, "I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty." Psychology is a young science, and many early practitioners satisfied their curiosity by conducting experiments that are now considered unethical. Take, for instance, the Stanford Prison Experiment, where male college students were taken from their homes by police men in a faux arrest (that looked real to neighbors and affected the males' reputations). They were then randomly divided into prisoners and guards; the prisoners were kept in makeshift cells and the guards ended up resorting to often humiliating means of control.
Dr. Seward is no stranger to these desires, and doesn't yet have the framework of ethics in psychology (those didn't exist until about the middle of the last century). He is a personification of the psychologist who wonders what would happen if he or she could intentionally damage or alter a part of the brain, or to raise identical twins separately and in tightly controlled environments, to finally separate nurtu It could also be that Stoker is criticizing the unethical nature of many early psychologists, with which I couldn't disagree.
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