bad intention of its practitioners, what can be explained from their intentions and what from this intention itself should, on the contrary, be explained on the basis of the objective tendencies operative behind the backs of these practitioners. Of course, the particularities of his personal creativity and the entire weight of his scientific experience determined the specific form of universalism which the idea of reflexology acquired in the hands of Bekhterev. But in Pavlov [1928/1963, p. 41] as well, whose personal contribution and scientific experience are entirely different, reflexology is the “ultimate science,” “an omnipotent method,” which brings “full, true and permanent human happiness.” And in their own way behaviorism and Gestalt theory cover the same route. Obviously, rather than the mosaic of good and evil intentions among the investigators we should study the unity in the processes of regeneration of scientific tissue in psychology, which determines the intention of all the investigators.

Precisely what the dependency of each psychological operation upon the general formula means can be illustrated with any problem that transcends the boundaries of the special discipline that raised it.

When Lipps [1897, p. 146] says about the unconscious that it is less a psychological problem than the problem for psychology, he has in mind that the unconscious is a problem of general psychology. By this he wished to say, of course, no more than that this question will be answered not as a result of this or that particular investigation, but as a result of a fundamental investigation by means of the general science, i.e., by comparing the widely varying data of the most heterogeneous areas of science; by correlating the given problem with several of the basic premises of scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and with several of the most general results of all sciences, on the other; by finding a place for this concept in the system of the basic concepts of psychology; by a fundamental dialectical analysis of the nature of this concept and the features of being that it corresponds to and reflects. This investigation logically precedes any concrete investigation of particular questions of subconscious life and determines the very formulation of the problem in such investigations.

As MUnsterberg [1920, p. v], defending the need for such an investigation for another set of problems, splendidly put it: “In the end it is better to get an approximately exact preliminary answer to a question that is stated correctly than to answer with a precision to the last decimal point a question that is stated inaccurately.” A correct statement of a question is no less a matter of scientific creativity and investigation than a correct answer—and it is much more crucial. The vast majority of contemporary psychological investigations write out the last decimal point with great care and precision in answer to a question that is stated fundamentally incorrectly.

Whether we accept with MUnsterberg [1920, pp. 158-163] that the subconscious is simply physiological and not psychological; or whether we agree with others that the subconscious consists of phenomena that temporarily are absent from consciousness, like the whole mass of potentially conscious reminiscences, knowledge and habits; whether we call those phenomena subconscious that do not reach the threshold of consciousness, or those of which we are minimally conscious, which are peripheral in the field of consciousness, automatic and unnoted; whether we find a suppression of the sexual drive to be the basis of the subconscious, like Freud, or