bate is about a twofold subject: about the hypothesis and about the facts that can be observed.

One more step in this direction, and we return to where we started: to the difficulty that compelled us to hypothesize an unconscious.

We can see that psychology finds itself here in a tragicomic situation: I want to, but I cannot. It is forced to accept the unconscious so as not to fall into absurdities. But accepting it, it falls into even greater absurdities and runs back in horror. It is like a man who, running from a wild animal and into an even greater danger, runs back to the wild animal, the lesser danger—but does it really make any difference from what he dies? Wundt views in this theory an echo of the mystical philosophy of nature [Naturphilosophie] of the early 19th century. With him Lange (1914, p. 251) accepts that the unconscious mind is an intrinsically contradictory concept. The unconscious must be explained physically and chemically and not psychologically, else we allow “mystical agents,” “arbitrary constructions that can never be verified,” to enter science.

Thus, we are back to Høffding: there is a physico-chemical sequence, which in some fragmentary points is suddenly a nihilo accompanied by a mental sequence. Please, be good enough to understand and scientifically interpret the “fragment.” What does this debate mean for the methodologist? We must psychologically transcend the boundary of immediately perceived consciousness and continue it, but in such a way as to separate the concept from sensation. Psychology as the science of consciousness is in principle impossible. As the science of the unconscious mind it is doubly impossible. It would seem that there is no way out, no solution for this quadrature of the circle. But physics finds itself in exactly the same position. Admittedly, the physical sequence extends further than the mental one, but this sequence is not infinite and without gaps either. It was science that made it in principle continuous and infinite and not immediate experience. It extended this experience by excluding the eye. This is also psychology’s task.

Hence, interpretation is not only a bitter necessity for psychology, but also a liberating and essentially most fruitful method of knowledge, a salto vitale, which for bad jumpers turns into a salto mortale. Psychology must develop its philosophy of equipment, just as physics has its philosophy of the thermometer. In practice both parties in psychology have recourse to interpretation: the subjectivist has in the end the words of the subject, i.e., his behavior and mind are interpreted behavior. The objectivist will inevitably interpret as well. The very concept of reaction implies the necessity of interpretation, of sense, connection, relation. Indeed, actio and reactio are concepts that are originally mechanistic—one must observe both and deduce a law. But in psychology and physiology the reaction is not equal to the stimulus. It has a sense, a goal, i.e., it fulfills a certain function in the larger whole. It is qualitatively connected with its stimulus. And this sense of the reaction as a function of the whole, this quality of the interrelation, is not given in experience, but found by inference. To put it more easily and generally: when we study behavior as a system of reactions, we do not study the behavioral acts in themselves (by the organs), but in their relation to other acts—to stimuli. But the relation and the quality of the relation, its sense, are never the subject of immediate perception, let alone the relation between two heterogeneous sequences—between stimuli and reactions. The following is extremely important: the reaction is an answer. An answer can only be studied according to the quality of its relation with the question, for this is the sense of answer which is not found in perception but in interpretation.

This is the way everybody proceeds.

Bekhterev distinguishes the creative reflex. A problem is the stimulus, and creativity is the response reaction or a symbolic reflex. But the concepts of creativity