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are all psychological theories of the purest water. Hence the mistaken conclusion:

the role of child psychology cannot be reduced, of course, to the gathering of factual

data and their preliminary classification, i.e., to the preparatory work. But the role

of the logical principles developed by Shchelovanov and Bekhterev can and must

precisely be reduced to this. After all, the new discipline has no idea of childhood,

no conception of development, no research goal, i.e., it does not state the problem

of child behavior and personality, but only disposes of the principle of objective

observation, i.e., a good technical rule. However, using this weapon nobody has

drawn out any great truths.

The author’s second mistake is connected with this. The lack of understanding

of the positive value of psychology and the underestimation of its role results from

the most important and methodologically childish idea that one can study only what

is given in immediate experience. His whole “methodological” theory is built upon

a single syllogism: (1) psychology studies consciousness; (2) given in immediate ex-

perience is the consciousness of the adult; “the empirical study of the phylogenetic

and ontogenetic development of consciousness is impossible”; (3) therefore, child

psychology is impossible.

But it is a gross mistake to suppose that science can only study what is given

in immediate experience. How does the psychologist study the unconscious; the

historian and the geologist, the past; the physicist-optician, invisible beams, and the

philologist—ancient languages? The study of traces, influences, the method of in-

terpretation and reconstruction, the method of critique and the finding of meaning

have been no less fruitful than the method of direct “empirical” observation.

Ivanovsky used precisely the example of psychology to explain this for the meth-

odology of science. Even in the experimental sciences the role of immediate expe-

rience becomes smaller and smaller. Planck19 says that the unification of the whole

system of theoretical physics is reached due to the liberation from anthropomorphic

elements, in particular from specific sense perceptions. Planck [1919/1970, p. 118]

remarks that in the theory of light and in the theory of radiant energy in general,

physics works with such methods that

the human eye is totally excluded, it plays the role of an accidental, admittedly highly

sensitive but very limited reagent; for it only perceives the light beams within a small

area of the spectrum which hardly attains the breadth of one octave. For the rest of

the spectrum the place of the eye is taken by other perceiving and measuring

instruments, such as, for example, the wave detector, the thermo-element, the

bolometer, the radiometer, the photographic plate, the ionization chamber. The

separation of the basic physical concept from the specific sensory sensation was

accomplished, therefore, in exactly the same way as in mechanics where the concept

of force has long since lost its original link with muscular sensations.

Thus, physics studies precisely what cannot be seen with the eye. For if we,

like the author, agree with Stern [1914, p. 7] that childhood is for us “a paradise

lost forever,” that for us adults it is impossible to “fully penetrate in the special

properties and structure of the child’s mind” as it is not given in direct experience,

we must admit that the light beams which cannot be directly perceived by the eye

are a paradise lost forever as well, the Spanish inquisition a hell lost forever, etc.,

etc. But the whole point is that scientific knowledge and immediate perception do

not coincide at all. We can neither experience the child’s impressions, nor witness

the French revolution, but the child who experiences his paradise with all directness

and the contemporary who saw the major episodes of the revolution with his own

eyes are, despite that, farther from the scientific knowledge of these facts than we

are. Not only the humanities, but the natural sciences as well, build their concepts