chology in the same way: everything before Bekbterev was a mistake, everything after Bekhterev is the truth. Many psychologists assess the crisis likewise. Since it is subjective, it is the easiest initial naive viewpoint. The psychologists whom we examined in the chapter on the unconscious [41] also reason this way: there is empirical psychology, which is permeated by metaphysical idealism—this is a remnant; and there is a genuine methodology of the era, which coincides with Marxism. Everything which is not the first must be the sec6nd, as no third possibility is given.

Psychoanalysis is in many respects the opposite of empirical psychology. This already suffices to declare it to be a Marxist system! For these psychologists the crisis coincides with the struggle they are fighting. There are allies and enemies, other distinctions do not exist.

The objective-empirical diagnoses of the crisis are no better: the severity of the crisis is measured by the number of schools that can be counted. Allport, in counting the currents of American psychology, defended this point of view (counting schools): the school of James and the school of Titchener, behaviorism and psychoanalysis. The units involved in the elaboration of the science are enumerated side by side, but not a single attempt is made to penetrate into the objective meaning of what each school is defending and the dynamic relations between the schools.

The error becomes more serious when one begins to view this situation as a fundamental characteristic of a crisis. Then the boundary between this crisis and any other, between the crisis in psychology and any other science, between every particular disagreement or debate and a crisis, is erased. In a word, one uses an anti-historical and anti-methodological approach which usually leads to absurd results.

Portugalov (1925, p. 12) wishes to argue the incomplete and relative nature of rcflexology and not only slips into agnosticism and relativism of the purest order, but ends up with obvious nonsense. “In the chemistry, mechanics, electrophysics and electrophysiology of the brain everything is changing dramatically and nothing has yet been clearly and definitely demonstrated.” Credulous persons believe in natural science, but “when we stay in the realm of medicine, do we really believe, with the hand on our heart, in the unshakable and stable force of natural science . . .and does natural science itself . . .believe in its unshakable, stable, and genuine character?”

There follows an enumeration of the theoretical changes in the natural sciences which are, moreover, lumped together. A sign of equality is put between the lack of solidity or stability of a particular theory and the whole of natural science, and what constitutes the foundation of the truth of natural science—the change of its theories and views—is passed off as the proof of its impotence. That this is agnosticism is perfectly dear, but two aspects deserve to be mentioned in connection with what follows: (1) in the whole chaos of views that serve to picture the natural sciences as lacking a single firm point, it is only . . . subjective child psychology based upon introspection which turns out to be unshakable; (2) amidst all the sciences which demonstrate the unreliability of the natural sciences, geometry is listed alongside optics and bacteriology. It so happens that

Euclid43 said that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles; thbachevsky~ dethroned Euclid and demonstrated that the sum of the angles of a triangle is less than two right angles, and Riemann45 dethroned Lobachevsky and demonstrated that the sum of the angles of a triangle is more than two right angles (ibid., p. 13).

We will still have more than one Qccasion to meet the analogy between geometry and psychology, and therefore it is worthwhile to memorize this model of a-methodological thinking: (1) geometry is a natural science; (2) Linné,’~ Cuvier,47