dinary knowledge
of men, but may discover means for an insight which goes as far beyond
the instinctive understanding of man as the scientific diet prescribed
by a physician goes beyond the fancies of a cook. The manager may
believe that he can recognize at the first glance for which kind of
work the labourer is fit: and yet the psychological analysis with the
methods of exact experiments may easily demonstrate that his judgment
is entirely mistaken. Moreover, although such practical psychologists
of the street or of the office may develop a certain art of
recognizing particular features in the individual, they cannot
formulate the laws and cannot lay down those permanent relations from
which others may learn.

Yet even this claim of the psychological scholar seems idle pride. Had
the world really to wait for his exact statistics and his formulae of
correlation of mental traits in order to get general statements and
definite descriptions of the human types and of the mental
diversities? Are not the writings of the wise men of all times full of
such psychological observations? Has not the consciousness of the
nations expressed itself in an abundance of sayings and songs, of
proverbs and philosophic words, which contains this naive
psychological insight into the characters and temperaments of the
human mind? We may go back thousands of years to the contemplations of
oriental wisdom, we may read the poets of classic antiquity, or
Shakespeare, or Goethe, we may study what the great religious leaders
and statesmen, the historians and the jurists, have said about man and
his behaviour; and we find an over-abundance of wonderful sayings
with which no textbooks of psychology can be compared.

This is all true. And yet, is it not perhaps all entirely false? Can
this naive psychology of the ages, to which the impressionism and the
wisdom of the finest minds have so amply contributed, really make
superfluous the scientific efforts for the psychology of groups and
correlations and individual traits? It seems almost surprising that
this overwhelmingly rich harvest of prescientific psychology has never
been examined from the standpoint of scientific psychology, and that
no one has sifted the wheat from the chaff. The very best would be not
only to gather such material, but to combine the sayings of the naive
psychologists in a rounded system of psychology. In all ages they
surely must have been among the best observers of mankind,