Page:B20442294.djvu/110

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82
SEX AND CHARACTER

renewed insistence upon which as a goal of science we owe to L. William Stern; it will be more than a sort of polity of the motor and sensory reactions of the individual, and in so far will not sink so low as the usual "results" of the modern experimental psychologists, which, indeed, are little more than statistics of physical experiments. It will hope to retain some kind of contact with the actualities of the soul which the modern school of psychology seems to have forgotten, and will not have to fear that it will have to offer to ardent students of psychology no more than profound studies of words of one syllable, or of the results on the mind of small doses of caffein. It is a lamentable testimony to the insufficiency of modern psychology that distinguished men of science, who have not been content with the study of perception and association, have yet had to hand over to poetry the explanation of such fundamental facts as heroism and self-sacrifice.

No science will become shallow so quickly as psychology if it deserts philosophy. Its separation from philosophy is the true cause of its impotency. Psychology will have to discover that the doctrine of sensations is practically useless to it. The empirical psychologists of to-day, in their search for the development of character, begin with investigation of touch and the common sensations. But the analysis of sensations is simply a part of the physiology of sense, and any attempt to bring it into relation with the real problems of psychology must fail.

It is a misfortune of the scientific psychology of the day that it has been influenced so deeply by two physicists, Fechner and von Helmholtz, with the result that it has failed to recognise that only the external and not the internal world can be reconstructed from sensations. The two most intelligent of the empirical psychologists of recent times, William James and R. Avenarius, have felt almost instinctively that psychology cannot really rest upon sensations of the skin and muscles, although, indeed, all modern psychology does depend upon study of sensations. Dilthey did not lay enough stress on his argument that existing