of heat can be checked only against other sensations. For Deichler the quantitative estimations give a measure for the correctness of introspection. In sum, experiment does not extend our knowledge, it checks it. Psychology does not yet have a methodology of its equipment and has not yet raised the question of an apparatus which would—like the thermometer—liberate us from introspection rather than check or amplify it. The philosophy of the chronoscope is a more difficult matter than its technique. But about the indirect method in psychology we will come to speak more than once.

Zelenyj (1923) is right in pointing out that in Russia the word “method” means two different things: (1) the research methods, the technology of the experiment; and (2) the epistemological method, or methodology, which determines the research goal, the place of the science, and its nature. In psychology the epistemological method is subjective, although the research methods may be partially objective. In physiology the epistemological method is objective, although the research methods may be partially subjective as in the physiology of the sense organs. Let us add that the experiment reformed the research methods, but not the epistemological method. For this reason, he says that the psychological method can only have the value of a diagnostic device in the natural sciences.

This question is crucial for all methodological and concrete problems of psychology. For psychology the need to fundamentally transcend the boundaries of immediate experience is a matter of life and death. The demarcation, separation of the scientific concept from the specific perception, can take place only on the basis of the indirect method. The reply that the indirect method is inferior to the direct one is in scientific terms utterly false. Precisely because it does not shed light upon the plentitude of experience, but only on one aspect, it accomplishes scientific work: it isolates, analyzes, separates, abstracts a single feature. After all, in immediate experience as well we isolate the part that is the subject of our observation. Anyone who deplores the fact that we do not share the ant’s immediate experience of chemical beams is beyond help, says Engels, for on the other hand we know the nature of these beams better than ants do. The task of science is not to reduce everything to experience. If that were the case it would suffice to replace science with the registration of our perceptions. Psychology’s real problem resides also in the fact that our immediate experience is limited, because the whole mind is built like an instrument which selects and isolates certain aspects of phenomena. An eye that would see everything, would for this very reason see nothing. A consciousness that was aware of everything would be aware of nothing, and knowledge of the self, were it aware of everything, would be aware of nothing. Our knowledge is confined between two thresholds, we see but a tiny part of the world. Our senses give us the world in the excerpts, extracts that are important for us. And in between the thresholds it is again not the whole variety of changes which is registered, and new thresholds exist. Consciousness follows nature in a saltatory fashion as it were, with blanks and gaps. The mind selects the stable points of reality amidst the universal movement. It provides islands of safety in the Heraclitean stream. It is an organ of selection, a sieve filtering the world and changing it so that it becomes possible to act. In this resides its positive role—not in reflection (the non-mental reflects as well; the thermometer is more precise than sensation), but in the fact that it does not always reflect correctly, i.e., subjectively distorts reality to the advantage of the organism.

If we were to see everything (i.e., if there were no absolute thresholds) including all changes that constantly take place (i.e., if no relative thresholds existed), we would be confronted with chaos (remember how many objects a microscope reveals in a drop of water). What would be a glass of water? And what a river? A pond