new heights of
beauty and harmony, as it has not seldom done before. Our social
conscience must be wide awake; it will not be a blind fate which will
decide when the door of the future opens whether we shall meet the
lady or the tiger.

X

NAIVE PSYCHOLOGY

The scientific psychologists started on a new road yesterday. For a
long time their chief interest was to study the laws of the mind. The
final goal was a textbook which would contain a system of laws to
which every human mind is subjected. But in recent times a change has
set in. The trend of much of the best work nowadays is toward the
study of individual differences. The insight into individual
personalities was indeed curiously neglected in modern psychology.
This does not mean that the declaration of psychological independence
insisted that all men are born equal, nor did any psychologist fancy
that education or social surroundings could form all men in equal
moulds. But as scientists they felt no particular interest in the
richness of colours and tints. They intentionally neglected the
question of how men differ, because they were absorbed by the study of
the underlying laws which must hold for every one. It is hardly
surprising that the psychologists chose this somewhat barren way; it
was a kind of reaction against the fantastic flights of the psychology
of olden times. Speculations about the soul had served for centuries.
Metaphysics had reigned and the observation of the real facts of life
and experience had been disregarded. When the new time came in which
the psychologists were fascinated by the spirit of scientific method
and exact study of actual facts, the safest way was for them to
imitate the well-tested and triumphant procedures of natural science.
The physicist and the chemist seek the laws of the physical universe,
and the psychologist tried to act like them, to study the elements
from which the psychical universe is composed and to find the laws
which control them. But while it was wise to make the first forward
march in this one direction, the psychologist finally had to
acknowledge that a no less important interest must push him on an
opposite way. The human mind is not important to us only as a type.
Every social aim reminds us that we must understand the individual
personality. If we deal with children in the classroom or with
criminals in the courtroom, with customers