in principle independently from immediate experience. We are reminded of Engels’ words about the ants and the limitations of our eye.

How do the sciences proceed in the study of what is not immediately given? Generally speaking, they reconstruct it, they re-create the subject of study through the method of interpreting its traces or influences, i.e., indirectly. Thus, the historian interprets traces—documents, memoirs, newspapers, etc.—and nevertheless history is a science about the past, reconstructed by its traces, and not a science about the traces of the past, it is about the revolution and not about documents of the revolution. The same is true for child psychology. Is childhood, the child’s mind, really inaccessible for us, does it not leave any traces, does it not manifest or reveal itself? It is just a matter of how to interpret these traces, by what method. Can they be interpreted by analogy with the traces of the adult? It is, therefore, a matter of fmding the right interpretation and not of completely refraining from any interpretation. After all, historians too are familiar with more than one erroneous construct based upon genuine documents which were falsely interpreted. What conclusion follows from this? Is it really that history is “a paradise forever lost”? But the same logic that calls child psychology a paradise lost would compel us to say this about history as well. And if the historian, or the geologist, or the physicist were to argue like the reflexologist, they would say: as we cannot immediately experience the past of mankind and the earth (the child’s mind) and can only immediately experience the present (the adult’s consciousness)—which is why many falsely interpret the past by analogy with the present or as a small present (the child as a small adult)— history and geology are subjective, impossible. The only thing possible is a history of the present (the psychology of the adult person). The history of the past can only be studied as the science of the traces of the past, of the documents etc. as such, and not of the past as such (through the methods of studying reflexes without any attempt at interpreting them).

This dogma—of immediate experience as the single source and natural boundary of scientific knowledge—in principle makes or breaks the whole theory of subjective and objective methods. Vvedensky and Bekhterev grow from a single root:

both hold that science can only study what is given in self-observation, i.e., in the immediate perception of the psychological. Some rely on the mental eye and build a whole science in conformity with its properties and the boundaries of its action. Others do not rely on it and only wish to study what can be seen with the real eye. This is why I say that reflexology, methodologically speaking, is built entirely according to the principle that history should be defined as the science of the documents of the past. Due to the many fruitful principles of the natural sciences, reflexology proved to be a highly progressive current in psychology, but as a theory of method it is deeply reactionary, because it leads us back to the naive sensualistic prejudice that we can only study what can be perceived and to the extent we perceive it.

Just as physics is liberating itself from anthropomorphic elements, i.e., from specific sensory sensations and is proceeding with the eye fully excluded, so psychology must work with the concept of the mental: direct self-observation must be excluded like muscular sensation in mechanics and visual sensation in optics. The subjectivists believe that they refuted the objective method when they showed that genetically speaking the concepts of behavior contain a grain of self-observation—cf. Chelpanov (1925),20 Kravkov (1922),21 Portugalov (1925).22 But the genetic origin of a concept says nothing about its logical nature: genetically, the concept of force in mechanics also goes back to muscular sensation.

The problem of self-observation is a problem of technique and not of principle. It is an instrument amidst a number of other instruments, as the eye is for physicists.