Anlage thus seems to present the subject of experience in a new light. So long as we were dealing with the psychological individual there was no call to talk of Anlage but only of psychoplasm. Now, however, in dealing with concrete individuals this need is obvious; and the difference is important. This Anlage, like experience generally, more or less inhibits development in some directions while more or less facilitating it in others. And yet it is not itself experience, for of the elaboration or synthesis that it implies the concrete individual, to whom it belongs, knows nothing; but that which is not experience for any experient is not experience at all. So, though in itself complex, as implying previous synthesis, yet for the concrete individual concerned it is simple, for what he has not synthesized he cannot psychically analyze1. Hence we sometimes call it instinct?. It is anything but a tabula rasa in itself: it is such, however, for the concrete individual; for his experience-so far as we know -begins with it.

1 Cf. above, ch. v, § 2, note 3, p. 105.

2 Cf. above, ch. iv, § 1, pp. 74 f.; ch. vii, § 2, pp. 181 f.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE CONCRETE INDIVIDUAL AND CHARACTEROLOGY

Questions of Method.

§ I. After all we have yet to find the concrete individual as psychology conceives him: find him 'all in all' we never can. Yet he is no mere concept. Self-consciousness assures us of his reality more immediately than we are assured of any reality besides. I am certain that I am, but as to what I am there is much I do not know. It is indeed a commonplace which none dispute that no man stands revealed fully and all round either to himself or to others; for as Leibniz has well said, "l'individualité enveloppe l'infini1." Still, with equal truth it may be rejoined that we find only concrete individuals—a fact, however, which merely brings out the difficulty. Whatever we know about other concrete individuals has been acquired by comparing one with another, and thus can only be stated in general terms. But no formulation of general terms is ever adequate to concrete reality; nevertheless such generalities are all the material we commonly have. Unscientifically, it may be, but with great sagacity and acumen, the human race has already accumulated an embarrassing wealth of such material. "The proper study of mankind is man,' and it is the study which mankind has longest and most ardently pursued.

To transform this practical Menschenkenntniss into a psychology of the individual is the problem. But if we cannot find the concrete individual, as psychology conceives him, how, it may be asked, is this problem to be solved? On the other hand, if we find only concrete individuals, is there really any problem at all: what, in fact, is Menschenkenntniss but just mankind's acquaint

ance with man? To dispose of this objection as satisfactorily as may be would involve an excursion into logic, which would be here quite out of place1; but psychology itself-in the principle of progressive differentiation-points to a shorter way that will amply suffice. This principle, as we have already seen, entails that knowledge must begin with general distinctions and can only later advance to those more special. For the first step, to recognise an individual as belonging to a kind, a 'diagnostic definition 'the simpler the better-is all that is required; and when we talk of finding only concrete individuals, recognition of this sort is all that is implied. To find the concrete individual conceived as the limit of a series of progressive differentiations, we may, then, set out from concrete individuals defined by class marks, but this process of 'determination'—which is logically the same throughout-will never enable us to reach any one of the class as it actually is.

The only clue we have through this seeming impasse is to be found in the 'general psychology,' analytic and genetic, which we just now left behind. That does not start from the individual defined by class marks, but from the individual as known to himself. Into the 'schema' thus provided-if only the schema is sound-every concrete individual ought to fit; and the more the schema was thus filled out, the more definite would be the place assigned to each and the more trustworthy the schema itself. Thus general and special psychology would become mutually complementary. But to this end it would be needful to replace casual and unsystematic comparison of characteristics by a comparative method enabling us to deal with individuals as persons, as having a character. The special or individual psychology thus obtainable might perhaps be called a branch of 'comparative psychology'; but in view of the restricted use of that term, which is now in vogue—as dealing, that is to say, not with persons but with kinds-we need one more distinctive. Characterology, first used fifty years ago3, seems useful; at any rate it is coming to be generally used; and so, though at present unfamiliar to English ears, we may venture to adopt it.

1 C. F. Sigwart's Logic, ii. § 77.

Cf. above, ch. xii, § 5, P. 304.

3 By Julius Bahnsen, a well-known pessimist and disciple of Schopenhauer, in a work entitled Beiträge zur Charakterologie u.s.w. 1857.

But many, who fully recognise the difficulty we have just indicated, refuse or neglect to accept the solution we have suggested. At this point, in fact, a divergence of method, akin to that which has presented itself at every stage throughout our preceding exposition', here reappears in a very crucial form-the divergence, that is, between presentational or atomistic psychology, psychology without a subject, and the psychology with one, which we have striven to uphold. Since the experient subject is neither immediately presented (to an internal sense) nor mediately accessible (through a finite analysis) it is impossible-so it is argued— to do more than classify characteristics, for these are all that we can ever observe or infer. But in comparing characteristics only the resemblances or differences among these can be ascertained. What we want, however, is to account for them: that for us is what characterology means. It seeks not merely to analyze, but to discover the subject synthesizing which the analysis implies. The methods we are criticizing, though seemingly direct, are really inverse methods, attempts to determine a cause by what are largely its effects. Their continual references to psychical structure, to psychical elements, or to compounds of these of varying degrees of complexity-implying not a fundamental unity but rather an ultimate manifold of presentational units; the stress laid on laws coordinating or subordinating such elements of character, or on laws of association and inhibition by which these are supposed to be built up-as if generalisations could effect anything; even the adoption of the phraseology of the old faculty-psychology, sense, intellect, emotion and will-as if no cardinal function were to be found in psychical life: all these, more or less distinctly betray a failure to recognise the subjective centrality and unity essential to any experience.

It is just this central unity of experience that makes a direct method possible in psychology to an extent that is not possible in the natural sciences. There experiment-the advance from cause to effect-has a very limited range. In psychology—so far as the subject is active-all experience is experiment. It is only our prevalently objective attitude-ever 'on the outlook'-that has led to the naturalistic bias in psychology and the consequent

1 Cf. above, ch. i, § 6, pp. 24 ff.

2 More exactly the psychology which ignores the subject that it everywhere implies. Cf. above, ch. i, § 5, p. 23.

inversion of its basal standpoint, the introspective. But from this standpoint alone do we reach the idea of real centrality; then we grasp that transcendental, synthetic, 'unity through apperception,' which is the key to all the categories, and the supreme principle of knowledge. If we let this go, or rather-for we cannot really let it go-if we ignore it, we may analyze and correlate without end, but all individuality is gone for ever. Such ignoration is part of the method of the natural sciences, and the more characterology adopts it, the more it belies its name1.

1 Perhaps the greatest sinner in this respect is Fr. Paulhan (Les Caractères, 2me éd. 1901), who is however an avowed presentationist. For an able criticism of Paulhan's standpoint see Fouillée's Tempérament et Caractère, 4me éd. 1901, pp. 122 -130. But the latest-and the most logical outcome-of such inverse methods is the insistence of some, who employ them, on a sharp distinction between the scope of characterology as here defined and the scope of their own investigations. These are not concerned with characterology, or individual psychology, but with 'differential psychology.' According to Dr Stern, the leading exponent of this new psychology (Ueber Psychologie der individuellen Differenzen, 1900; Die Differentielle Psychologie in ihrer methodischen Grundlagen, 1911) our standpoint-though he has maintained elsewhere that it is not only valid, but vital to a true Weltanschauung (L. W. Stern, Person und Sache, System der philosophischen Weltanschauung, i. 1906)—is here to be ignored as a purely philosophical position beyond the scope of empirical science. Well, obviously that depends upon how 'empirical' is defined, and also upon what the science is. If the science be that of individual experience, and if every experience implies the duality of subject and object--in other words, if our standpoint is the right one-it is hard to see how such an epistemological dogma can be sustained. On the other hand, if our standpoint is wrong, it is hard to see how such a dogma can be attained. There is a vast deal of truth in epistemology that it is beyond the province of psychology to question; but, at least, we must agree with Professor Stumpf "that nothing can be true in epistemology that is false in psychology." ("Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie," Abhandl. der bayer. Akad., 1891, Offprint, p. 18.)

It is, however, not so much with Dr Stern's inconsistency—which is remediable—as with his admission that the comparative method, worked on the lines of a presentational or atomistic psychology, does not lead to characterology, that we are concerned. That is the important truth for which we are contending. How far, in that case, 'differential psychology' is entitled to be called psychology at all is very questionable. It certainly formulates methods, 'experimental and statistical,' which have brought together a mass of rather miscellaneous anthropological and psychological items. These it essays to measure—or at least, to graduate-and partially even to correlate. Such results, as they stand, can, however, hardly be called psychology, though they may be useful to a psychologist who knows how to interpret them—an ability, by the way, which many of the 'exact' inquirers who have accumulated them entirely lack. Yet with such material, Dr Stern, at any rate, believes that-in the distant future-it will be possible to construct what has been called a psychogram of the concrete individual. More or less incomplete this psychography must be, he allows; but at least its ideal is idiographic, not nomothetic, as that of general psychology, in a sense, may be said to be. It might be thought that after all psychography was only characterology under

W. P.

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