Future Prospects

And this brings us to the whole point; the psychologist wants it both ways: he arrogates the right to explore the mysteries of consciousness to himself (and even says that all other studies are particular branches of his own), and at the same time he tries to make the exploration a scientific one. The psychologist wants to be able to interpret the paintings of William Blake and Paul Klee with the same surety that he knows the extinction-of-learning curves for Chimpanzees.

Unfortunately this is an irremediable conflict of aims, and here is the reason: The beginning of all Philosophies is the realisation (If you're a science student) or postulation (if you're an arts student) of an external world corresponding to that of our sense perceptions.

But the mere postulation of this external world does not explain what it was supposed to explain, namely the fact that consciousness finds itself placed in such a world. The external and internal worlds are distinguished by our identity with the latter, so that it is absurd to try and investigate ourselves by the same methods that we investigate objects.

This has been the method of Psychology up till now, and the result has only been an embarrassing and grotesque aping of human nature. The only legitimate methods are indirect ones; such as exploring the relation between Cybernetics and Neurology, and that between mathematical structure (which is, after all, a direct product of consciousness) and the physical model.

So there you have the complete picture: seven-point scales, circular definitions, conflicting statements, unscientific experiments, theories which leak like a sieve, rubber brains, and neo-impressionist inkblots, all juxtaposed into the spurious unity of "Psychology." (Perhaps "Psychologism" would have been more appropriate.)

In sum, I accuse the psychologist of three crimes. I accuse him of taking advantage of his position to the end of his own prestige. I accuse him of having an ineradicable almost sublime contempt for the truth. And, most seriously of all, I accuse him of mixing Art and Science.

—M. Heine.