when we talk of blue ink or a pilot’s art? [70] But on the other hand we are loyal to another logic—the logic of language. If the geometer even today calls his science with a name which means “measuring the earth,” then the psychologist can refer to his science by a name which once meant “theory of the soul.” Whereas the concept of measuring the earth is now too narrow for geometry, it was once a decisive step forward, to which the whole science owes its existence. Whereas the idea of the soul is now reactionary, it once was the first scientific hypothesis of ancient man, an enormous achievement of thought to which we owe the existence of our science now. Animals probably do not have the idea of the soul, nor do they have psychology. We understand that, historically, psychology had to begin with the idea of the soul. We are as little inclined to view this as simply ignorance and error as we consider slavery to be the result of a bad character. We know that science on its path toward the truth inevitably involves delusions, errors and prejudices. Essential for science is not that these exist, but that they, being errors, nevertheless lead to the truth, that they are overcome. That is why we accept the name of our science with all its age-old delusions as a vivid reminder of our victory over these errors, as the fighting scars of wounds, as a vivid testimony of the truth which develops in the incredibly complicated struggle with falsehood.

All sciences essentially proceed this way. Do the builders of the future really start from scratch, aren’t they those who complete and follow all that is genuine in human experience? Do they really not have allies and forebears in the past? Let us be shown but a single word, a single scientific name, which can be applied in a literal sense. Or do mathematics, philosophy, dialectics and metaphysics signify what they once signified? Let it not be said that two branches of knowledge about a single object must absolutely carry the same name. Let logic and the psychology of thinking be remembered. Sciences are not classified and named according to their object of study, but according to the principles and goals of the study. Does Marxism really not want to know its ancestors in philosophy? Only unhistorical and uncreative minds are inventive with respect to new names and sciences. Such ideas do not become Marxism. Chelpanov comes with the information that during the French revolution the term “psychology” was replaced by the term “ideology,” since for that era psychology was the science about the soul. But ideology formed part of zoology and was divided into physiological and rational ideology. This is correct, but what incalculable harm results from such unhistorical word usage can be seen from the difficulty which we now have in deciphering different loci about ideology in Marx’s texts, how ambiguous this term sounds. It gives occasion to such “investigators” as Chelpanov to claim that for Marx ideology signified psychology. This terminological reform is partly responsible for the fact that the role and meaning of the older psychology is undervalued in the history of our science. And finally, it leads to a clear rupture with its genuine descendants, it severs the vivid line of unity. Chelpanov, who declared (1924, p. 27) that psychology has nothing in common with physiology, now vows for the Great Revolution. Psychology has always been physiological and “contemporary scientific psychology is the child of the psychology of the French revolution.” Only extreme ignorance or the expectation that others would be so ignorant can have dictated these phrases. Whose contemporary psychology? Mill’s or Spencer’s, Bain’s or Ribot’s? Correct. But that of Dilthey and Husserl, Bergson and James, MUnsterberg and Stout, Meinong and Lipps, Frank and Chelpanov? Can there be a bigger untruth? After all, all of these builders of the new psychology advanced another system as the foundation of science, a system which was hostile to Mill and Spencer, Bain, and Ribot. The same name which Chelpanov uses as a shelter they slighted “like a dead dog.” [71] But Chelpanov shelters behind names which are foreign and hostile to him and speculates on the