So, let us summarize. For empiricists it is necessary to have a language that is colloquial, indeterminate, confused, ambiguous, vague, in order that what is said can be reconciled with whatever you like—today with the church fathers, tomorrow with Marx. They need a word that neither provides a clear philosophical qualification of the nature of the phenomenon, nor simply its clear description, because the empiricists have no clear understanding and conception of their subject. The eclectics, both those that are so by principle and those that adhere to eclecticism only for the time being, are in need of two languages as long as they defend an eclectic point of view. But as soon as they leave this viewpoint and attempt to designate and describe a newly discovered fact or explain their own viewpoint on a subject, they lose their indifference to the language or the word.

Kornilov (1922), who made a new discovery, is prepared to turn the whole area to which he assigns this phenomenon from a chapter of psychology into an independent science—reactology. Elsewhere he contrasts the reflex with the reaction and views a fundamental difference between the two terms. They are based on wholly different philosophies and methodologies. Reaction is for him a biological concept and reflex a strictly physiological one. A reflex is only objective, a reaction is subjective objective. This explains why a phenomenon acquires one meaning when we call it a reflex and another when we call it a reaction.

Obviously, it makes a difference how we refer to the phenomena and there is a reason for pedantry when it is backed by an investigation or a philosophy. A wrong word implies a wrong understanding. It is not for nothing that Blonsky notices that his work and the outline of psychology by Jameson (1925)—this typical specimen of philistinism and eclecticism in science—overlap. To view the phrase “the dog is angry” as the problem is wrong if only because, as Shchelovanov (1929) justly pointed out, the finding of the term is the end point and not the starting point of the investigation. As soon as one or the other complex of reactions is referred to with some psychological term all further attempts at analysis are finished. If Blonsky would leave his eclectic stand, like Kornilov, and acknowledge the value of investigation or principle, he would find this out. There is not a single psychologist with whom this would not happen. And such an ironic observer of the “terminological revolutions” as Chelpanov suddenly turns out to be an astonishing pedant: he objects to the name “reactology.” With the pedantry of one of Chekhov’s gymnasium teachers he preaches that this term causes misunderstanding, first etymologically and second theoretically. The author declares with aplomb that etymologically speaking the word is entirely incorrect—we should say “reactiology” [reaktsiologija]. This is of course the summit of linguistic illiteracy and a flagrant violation of all the terminologieal principles of the 6th Congress on the international (Latin-Greek) basis of terms. Obviously, Korniov did not form his term from the home-bred “reaktsija,” but from reactio and he was perfectly right in doing so. One wonders how Chelpanov would translate “reactiology” into French, German, etc. But this is not what it is all about. It is about something else: Chelpanov declares that this term is inappropriate in Kornilov’s system of psychological views. But let