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Chapter 15

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 revo-

lution. 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 interpre-

tation. 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 bound-

ary of scientific knowledge—in principle makes or breaks the whole theory of sub-

jective 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 docu-

ments of the past. Due to the many fruitful principles of the natural sciences, re-

flexology 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 per-

ceive 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 psy-

chology 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.