folks
take the most pains"; "Nature passes nurture"; "Necessity is the
mother of invention"; "We are apt to believe what we wish for"; "Where
your will is ready, your foot is light."

All these proverbs and the maxims of other nations may be true, but
can we deny that they are on the whole so trivial that a psychologist
would rather hesitate to proclaim them as parts of his scientific
results? As far as they are true they are vague and hardly worth
mentioning, and where they are definite and remarkable they are hardly
true. We shall after all have to consult the individual authors to
gather the subtler observations on man's behaviour, even though they
furnish only semi-naive psychology. But the English contributions are
so familiar to every reader that it may be more interesting to listen
to the foreigners. Every nation has its thinkers who have the
reputation of being especially fine knowers of men. The French turn
most readily to La Rochefoucauld, and the Germans to Lichtenberg.
Certainly a word of La Rochefoucauld beside the psychologizing proverb
looks like the scintillating, well-cut diamond beside a moonstone. "We
imitate good actions through emulation, and bad ones through a
malignity in our nature which shame concealed and example sets at
liberty"; "It is much easier to suppress a first desire than to
satisfy those that follow"; "While the heart is still agitated by the
remains of a passion, it is more susceptible to a new one than when
entirely at rest"; "Women in love more easily forgive great
indiscretions than small infidelities"; "The reason we are not often
wholly possessed by a single vice is that we are distracted by
several." But is this not ultimately some degrees too witty to be
true, and has our system of prescientific psychology the right to open
the door to such glittering epigrams which are uttered simply to
tickle or to whip the vanity of man? Or what psychologist would
believe Lichtenberg when he claims: "All men are equal in their mental
aptitudes, and only their surroundings are responsible for their
differences"? He observes better when he says: "An insolent man can
look modest when he will, but a modest man can never make himself look
insolent"; or when he remarks: "Nothing makes a man old more quickly
than the thought that he is growing older"; or "Men do not think so
differently about life as they talk about it"; or "I have always found
that intense ambition and suspicion go together"; o