vagueness of thought. These metaphors are valuable as illustrations, but dangerous as formulas. It also leads to personifications through the ending -ism, of mental facts, functions, systems and theories, between which small mythological dramas are invented; (3) finally, the words and ways of speaking taken from the natural sciences which are used in a figurative sense bluntly serve deception. When the psychologist discusses energy, force, and even intensity, or when he speaks of excitation etc., he always covers a non-scientific concept with a scientific word and thereby either deceives, or once again underlines the whole indeterminate nature of the concept indicated by the exact foreign term.

Lalande [1923, p. 52] correctly remarks that the obscurity of language depends as much upon its syntax as upon its dictionary. In the construction of the psychological phrase we meet no fewer mythological dramas than in the lexicon. I want to add that the style, the manner of expression of a science is no less important. In a word, all elements, all functions of a language show the traces of the age of the science that makes use of them, and determine the character of its workings.

It would be mistaken to think that psychologists have not noticed the mixed character, the inaccuracy, and the mythological nature of their language. There is hardly any author who in one way or another has not dwelt upon the problem of terminology. Indeed, psychologists have pretended to describe, analyze and study very subtle things, full of nuances, they have attempted to convey the unique mental experience, the facts sui generis which occur only once, when science wished to convey the experience itself, i.e., when the task of its language was equal to that of the word of the artist. For this reason psychologists recommended that psychology be learned from the great novelists, spoke in the language of the impressionistic fine literature themselves, and even the best, most brilliant stylists among the psychologists were unable to create an exact language and wrote in a figurative-expressive way. They suggested, sketched, described, but did not record. This was the case for James, Lipps, and Binet.

The 6th International Congress of psychologists in Geneva (1909) put this question on its agenda and published two reports—by Baldwin and Claparède—on this topic, but did no more than establishing rules for linguistical possibilities, although Claparêde tried to give a definition of 40 laboratory terms. Baldwin’s dictionary in England and the technical and critical dictionary of philosophy in France have accomplished much, but despite this the situation becomes worse every year and to read a new book with the help of the above-mentioned dictionaries is impossible. The encyclopedia from which I take this information views it as one of its tasks to introduce solidity and stability into the terminology, but gives occasion to new instability as it introduces a new system of terms [Dumas, 1923].~’ [36]

The language reveals as it were the molecular changes that the science goes through. It reflects the internal processes that take shape—the tendencies of development, reform, and growth. We may assume, therefore, that the troubled condition of the language reflects a troubled condition of the science. We will not deal any further with the essence of this relation. We will take it as our point of departure for the analysis of the contemporary molecular terminological changes in psychology. Perhaps, we will be able to read in them the present and future fate of the science. Let us first of all begin with those who are tempted to deny any fundamental importance to the language of science and view such debates as scholastic logomachy. Thus, Chelpanov (1925) considers the attempt to replace the subjective terminology by an objective one as a ridiculous pretension, utter nonsense. The zoopsychologists (Beer, Bethe, Von UexkUll) have used “photoreceptor” instead of “eye”, “stiboreceptor” instead of “nose,” “receptor” instead of “sense organ” etc. (Chelpanov, 1925). [37]