338

ambiguity of the term “contemporary psychology.” Yes, in contemporary psychology there is a branch which can regard itself as the child of revolutionary psychology. But during his entire life (and today) Chelpanov has done nothing but attempt to chase this branch into a dark corner of science, to separate it from psychology.

But once again: bow dangerous is a common name and how unhistorically did the psychologists of France act who betrayed it!

This name was first introduced into science in 1590 by Goclenius, professor in Marburg, and accepted by his student Casmann in 1594. It was not introduced by Christian Wolff around the mid-eighteenth century and is not found for the first time in Melanchthon, as is usually incorrectly thought. It is mentioned by Ivanovsky as a name to indicate part of anthropology, which together with somatology formed one science. That this term is ascribed to Melanchthon is based on the preface of the publisher to the 13th volume of his writings, in which Melanchthon is incorrectly indicated as the first author of psychology. [72] This name was quite rightly retained by Lange, the author of the psychology without a soul. But isn’t psychology called the theory of the soul?, he asks. How can we conceive of a science which doubts whether it has a subject matter to study at all? However, he found it pedantic and unpractical to throw away the traditional name once the subject matter of the science had changed, and called for the unwavering acceptance of a psychology without a soul.

The endless fuss about psychology’s name started precisely with Lange’s reform. This name, taken in itself, ceased to mean anything. Each time one had to add: “without a soul,” “without any metaphysics,” “based on experience,” “from an empirical viewpoint,” etc. Psychology per se ceased to exist. Here resided Lange’s mistake. Having accepted the old name he did not embrace it fully, completely, did not distinguish, separate it from tradition. Once psychology is without a soul, then with a soul we do not have psychology, but something else. But here, of course, he did not so much lack good intentions, as strength. The time was not yet ripe for a division.

We, too, must now face this terminological matter which belongs to the theme of the division into two sciences.

How will we call natural scientific psychology? It is now often called objective, new, Marxist, scientific, the science of behavior. Of course, we will reserve the name psychology for it. But what kind of psychology? How do we distinguish it from every other system of knowledge which uses the same name? We only have to sum up a small part of the definitions which are now being applied to psychology in order to see that there is no logical unity at the basis of these divisions. Sometimes the epithet designates the school of behaviorism, sometimes Gestalt psychology; sometimes the method of experimental psychology, psychoanalysis; sometimes the principle of construction (eidetic, analytical, descriptive, empirical); sometimes the subject matter of the science (functional, structural, actual, intentional); sometimes the area of investigation (Individualpsychologie); sometimes the world view (personalism, Marxism, spiritualism, materialism); sometimes many things (subjective-objective, constructive-reconstructive, physiological, biological, associative, dialectical, etc. etc.). On top of that one talks about historical and understanding, explanatory and intuitive, scientific (Blonsky) and “scientific” (used by the idealists in the sense of natural-scientific) psychology.

What does the word “psychology” signify after this? Stout [1909, p. ix] says that “The time is rapidly approaching when no one will think of writing a book on Psychology in general, anymore than of writing a book on Mathematics in general.” All terms are unstable, they do not logically exclude each other, are not well-defined, are vague and obscure, ambiguous, accidental, and refer to secondary fea