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Chapter 15

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 meth-

odology 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 psy-

chology. 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 imme-

diate 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 uni-

versal 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 ad-

vantage of the organism.

If we were to see everything (i.e., if there were no absolute thresholds) includ-

ing 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